As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.- Carl Jung

It is not uncommon to find ancient indigenous sites that were constructed in exact alignment with the sun’s rays at significant times of the solar calendar. Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and ruins at ChacoCanyon in the United States are a few examples. With regard to the builders of Stonehenge and neighboring Maeshowe, Guardian blogger, Jonathan Jones, notes that, “the winter solstice must have been deeply important to them because on this day, and this day only, sunlight creates startling effects….Most astonishingly of all, it enters the long narrow entrance passage of the burial mound of Maeshowe on Orkney’s Mainland island and glows on the back wall of the inner chamber. The building becomes a giant camera, catching sunlight in a moment of mystery and wonder.”

The holidays or “holy days” that eventually evolved from Hanukah, indigenous winter solstice rituals, and the birth of Christ all focus on finding light in dark times. Mirroring the seasons, our psyches eventually reach the limits of tolerating darkness before light must be introduced, even if for brief periods of time. Conversely, overexposure to light can be harmful, and if taken to extremes can result in blindness.

This year as we in the Northern Hemisphere approach the annual winter solstice on December 21, we abide not only in seasonal darkness but in what appears to be a permanent psychic darkness resulting from catastrophic climate change and near-term extinction. In our despair, we may ask ourselves if there is any point in seeking to find any light in this terminal darkness. Why don’t we just mimic our bear brethren who willingly descend into the darkness for the winter and hibernate? Why not eat, drink, sate ourselves, sleep in, check out, and die? After all, glimpses of light are only poignant reminders of our inescapable predicament.

Twice in my life I have been told that I had cancer. Twice in my life I used those epiphanies to radically alter the way I live my life. At the moment, I am healthy and vibrantly alive, but human existence is profoundly fragile and uncertain, and the odds against any of us being alive at this moment in time are gargantuan.

As if the realities of near-term extinction were not devastating enough, the sinister silence and dubious distortions regarding Fukushima fallout heap darkness upon darkness, and we scour the psychic landscape for reasons to remain alive.

In a variety of other venues I have offered my perspective on the value of enhancing rather than diminishing our aliveness as we confront our terminal status. Rather than reiterate, I’ll take this winter solstice opportunity to cherish the light, knowing that its ultimate value can only be savored if we are genuinely able to sing with Simon and Garfunkel, “hello darkness my old friend.”

Many winters ago I was among several dozen Hopi-and non-Hopi individuals who sat in the dim light of a kiva on a frigid ceremonial night. The kachina dancers, always the ultimate teachers of the tribe, burst into the underground kiva chamber with the fury of the wind that howled above the ground. Shouting, drumming, and blasting their observers with a potentially terrifying cacophony, they began singing about the darkness as a necessary disciplinarian for the community. Certainly, I did not understand Hopi, but these words were later explained to me by crusty elders whose chiseled faces bore witness to their presence in more of these rituals than they could even count and to the darkness and light through which they had walked across many ceremonial calendar years. One of the intentions of shocking the community with intimidating kachina fury was and is to remind the people of their mortality and the reality that the profane perspective (that is to say in Anglo, psychological terminology, the human ego) will only harm the community and lead to individuals forgetting who they really are. As in virtually all indigenous ceremony, the sacred is central—the core of the community and of each individual.

Conversely, near the time of summer solstice the kachinas enter the outdoor plaza of the village as clowns, their bodies painted with black and white stripes, somewhat resembling zebras. For this ceremony, nothing is sacred, yet everything is sacred as they generally take the Trickster archetype over the top with raunchy humor and muddle-headed (yes, one of the kachinas is called the “Mudhead”), hysterically funny antics. Again, the underlying message is: Your profane, ego-based disregard for the sacred is “screwing you,” (sometimes literally salaciously pantomimed by the kachinas). The kachinas, like the ancient Greek Cassandra and the biblical prophets, are teachers who impersonate energies that the community reveres because the people believe they need constant reminders of what matters. They are deemed sacred forces who live in the village for six months of the year and in the clouds of the San Francisco Peaks of Northern Arizona the other half of the year. The black and white stripes are perhaps the most significant of all the clown symbols because these particular clown kachinas symbolize the integration of darkness and light in one person and one community.

I do not wish to romanticize the Hopi or any other group of indigenous people. They are confronting and healing their own wounds as a result of colonization. Yet they have not unequivocally lost, as civilized America has, their connection with the sacred through the earth community. Within the Hopi tradition is the teaching of “purification.” Throughout earth’s history, they believe, there have been four worlds, three of which have perished, and from their perspective this one is on an even more dramatic trajectory of self-destruction. According to the tradition, there must be a purification at the end of one world before another can begin. You might say that the Hopi have held in their psyches a profound sense of collapse and near-term extinction for millennia. It’s an integral aspect of their tradition as is dancing, singing, and a wicked sense of humor. Don’t forget the black and white stripes.

Some Hopi men I’ve known have gone into the plaza for ceremony, dressed as clowns, dancing and displaying bawdy kachina humor at the same time that their hearts were breaking. A terminally ill child, a brother killed in a car crash, a house burned to the ground—all reasons not to paint oneself with black and white stripes and become a fool in the plaza in order to join the community in remembering what really matters.

A useful practice with many indigenous people is this: Live as if every act, every task performed in daily life, every kindness expressed to another being and to oneself might be the last. This is one way I stay connected with the light in dark times. Walking in reverence, living contemplatively with gratitude, generosity, compassion, and an open heart that is willing to be broken over and over again. I do not always live the way I want to live. It’s a practice, and practice never makes perfect. Practice only makes practice, and if I think it’s perfect, I’m not practicing. Nevertheless, I’d rather stumble in the dark, finding an occasional candle to light the way than become blinded by excessive light. And so in this time of unprecedented darkness, find the light whenever possible, but most importantly, be the light for someone else who may not be as familiar with the darkness as you are. That may be why you came here.

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., was an adjunct professor of history and psychology for 11 years and a psychotherapist in private practice for 17 years. (She is not, and never has been, a licensed psychologist.) Her latest book Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, is unique in its offering of emotional and spiritual tools for preparing for living in a post-industrial world. Carolyn’s forthcoming book is Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Handbook For Inner Transition. Her other books include: Coming Out From Christian Fundamentalism: Affirming Sensuality, Social Justice, and The Sacred (2007) , U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn’t Tell You (2006) and The Journey of Forgiveness, (2000) All may be purchased at this site. She is available for speaking engagements and author events and can be contacted at carolyn@carolynbaker.net. Her blog is http://carolynbaker.net

People survive. People survive surmounting all obstacles, and people survive foiling all conspiracies hatched against them, and people survive defeating all aggressive powers.

It’s people who define their route of struggle, chart their road to victory, delimit their sovereign sphere, proclaim their sovereign rights, and restore their rights in sovereign space around life. People’s sovereign space and practice is a part of democracy, heart of politics.

But what happens when people find their “friends” are not their friends, their “leaders” are not their leaders, their “organizations” are not their organizations? What happens when people find their organizations are being sabotaged as part of a plan to defeat them, their organizations fail to foil sabotages activated against their organizations, their leaders fail to foresee, their organizations tail behind and fail to take initiative? What happens when people are demobilized and depoliticized?

These are crucial questions in the life of people. And, people’s life provides the answers to the questions.

Roman slaves found the answer: Spartacus. The Palestinian people found the answer: Arafat. The people of apartheid ruled South Africa had their answer: Mandela. The Venezuelan people organized the answer in their Bolivarian way: Chavez. The Cuban people created the answer: Fidel.

It’s not the persons, the individual leaders that created sovereign space of people. Its people that create sovereign space, and standing on this sovereign space people give legitimacy. A historic-socio-economic perspective produced and developed the leaders, the collective leadership, the movement the leadership developed and guided.

All these perspectives, the Roman society, the state of Palestinian people’s struggle prior to the emergence of Arafat, the Venezuelan society controlled by thuggish upper echelon drunk with oil money that overwhelmed the entire society with clientele culture, are completely different from one another. And, Spartacus comes from another historical era.

However, in all the cases, it was contradictions that developed the leadership and organizations casting off chattering, old style, etc. Mandela and his friends had to make an arduous effort to shape ANC, African National Congress. Arafat had to face series of bloody fights in Jordan and Syria, conspiracy, subversion and adventurism. Fidel’s charting of course was a lone effort having no help from traditional leadership.

In all the cases, the new leadership was farsighted, not less competent than their adversaries. Otherwise, they could not have organized their struggles.

In all the cases, moral standing was higher than their adversaries. These made them credible and acceptable to their constituencies. In reverse term, their adversaries lost credibility and acceptability. This gain-loss process is slow and long.

In all the cases, the emerging leadership stood for honor and dignity, and for love for life. Hatred was not guiding them. Serving, not dictating people was their motto.

With this leadership, people gained primary space – resurrecting sense of honor and dignity, visualizing goal, questioning around, getting organized in effective way, shedding practice and culture decadent social forces imposed and overwhelmed with, getting rid of clichés, initiating with realistic approach.

These facilitated claiming people’s sovereign space – struggle to shape a dignified, peaceful, prosperous life. Their passive attitude to their sovereign space moved to the stage of actively making claims to their sovereign space.

Despite intermissions of adventurism and missteps the entire approach of these peoples was constructive, positive. There was no place for hatred. Love for humanity, all life and nature led the initiatives.

These shook off clacking, promises without the tinniest grain of sincerity, proclamations entirely hollow, observations without scientific investigation, sweeping remarks, indiscipline, isolation from constituency, showmanship, theatrical heroism. Imagine an undisciplined slave army confronting a Roman army! Slave army defeated “valiant” Roman army in a number of battles. That slave army was disciplined, and all its members meant participation, meaningful participation.

Brutalized space

People lose ground in an opposite situation, where mainstream politics shamelessly throws away all its glittering clothes and denudes its heart: politics-commercialized, politics-terrorized. People’s inalienable rights and sovereign space get lost. Even their political opportunities, in most cases only tiny fragments, gradually begin to wither away. Their democratic rights to life, honor and prospects for prosperity are snatched away, which is manifested in indignity, engineered disunity, craftily promoted and fed illogic, dominance of hoodlum controlled organizations, ascendancy of backward ideas, and lost land, wage, security and peace. A decadent culture facilitating and strengthening dominance of backward concepts and practices occupies people’s cultural space.

In a brutalized situation, people feel betrayed and turn apathetic, and political participation gradually takes a diminishing downturn, a dangerous turn of time that provides dominating forces tighten its grip on people’s entire life, which includes their organizations also. It’s, the imposed condition, like treating people as animal, like considering them as sub-human, and the imposition is made by dominating forces, the consideration is made by forces monopolizing power.

To people, only sounds and no work by those claiming leadership then turns synonymous to betrayal as violence, in its many forms and manifestations, by all or part of forces of status quo ransack people’s life and peace. People then withdraw trust from the high-sounding leadership.

In such a situation, a situation brutalized and overwhelmed with inactivity, a blabbering leadership finds organizing people difficult, sometimes impossible, but it finds no time to search its soul and method. It’s shallow and incomplete if there is any soul searching.

Should it be capitalocracy?

Democracy isn’t universal. It’s either, in the present world system, capital’s democracy or people’s democracy.
Capital’s democracy, irrespective of, fashionably coined, liberal or illiberal, upholds interests of dominating capital. Its arbitrary character, its, where and when necessary, secretive working, its power to hide its workings out of citizens’ sight and supervision, its manipulation with the political system make it nothing but capitalocracy.

Recent developments in the advanced capitalist democracies provide evidences. The reality is crude and coarse if a serious search is made about capitalist democracies in the periphery of the world system. It’s an uncouth reign of capital. Contemporary examples are abundant there in the entire system, where elected government exercises its power trampling primary requirements of democracy, and doesn’t even hesitate to throw away bare minimum flimsy cover of civility, and mainstream politics takes away all of the sovereign space people possess.

Democracies are now considered by mainstream on a yardstick of illiberal and liberal despite all the facts that emerge from contemporary democratic reality in advanced capitalist economies.

And, the reality is:

“An illiberal democracy is a democracy by procedure only; the people elect the government, but they have little influence on government policy. The lack of influence means the government does not accord the full human rights necessary to achieve substantive democracy.” (Hallie Ludsin, “Returning Sovereignty to the People”, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, vol. 46:97 2013)

“Liberal democracies”, Hallie Ludsin writes, “are associated with free and fair elections, protection for and promotion of the rule of law, protection for basic human rights, and neutrality toward the determination of the common good.” (ibid.)

Don’t contemporary developments, not only the Wikileaks, the Snowden syndrome and the Guardian experience in and Evo Morales hackling by the so-called liberal democracies show a face of liberal democracy? The engagement of spies to infiltrate organizations active in the area of environment in advanced capitalist democracies, the “role” they played, and the way their misdeed are being “treated” expose the no-space people “enjoy”. Now, there are near-innumerable press reports from advanced capitalist democracies that expose their inner-working, their non-accountability, their all encompassing surveillance, their way of misinforming people, their way of invading other societies.

Manipulation with study results, opinion polls, human rights, and organizations floated for these purposes expose the face of liberal democracies. In so-called liberal democracy, corporations are now treated as person that strengthens role of big money in politics. This puts money on a higher ground than citizens. The entire business of capitalist democracy is opaque, a “mysterious” business as capital strives to deny any limit.

These practices are now “trickling down” to backward societies, where dominating interests are trying to construct a façade of democracy. The donor-democracy designed for underdeveloped economies is now much exposed.

Sovereignty encroached

The question comes: Whether sovereignty of people or of capital?

“Sovereignty lies with the people, as proclaimed by most state constitutions and as protected by international law, including possibly customary international law. Sovereignty in the people means that the people are entitled to receive the benefits of sovereign rights, not the government.” (ibid.)

But, with an army of unemployed, with vandalized unions, with decline in share of wages, with people in debt bondage and having no mechanism to listen to their voice, with financial instability, with control over information and media, with control over culture and leisure time and entertainment, with legislature serving dominating economic interests, with an essentially inaccessible judiciary, with political power and politics shaped to serve dominating economic interests, people find their sovereignty is effectively lost. With capital encroaching people’s life and rights all of people’s sovereign space is encroached.

A reality of spiraling disparity finds millions of people both in matured capitalist and backward economies confronting destitution while the rich protect and expand their wealth. The reality doesn’t allow people to act as source of sovereignty of reigning power, and reigning power thus de-legitimizes itself.

To the people of today’s world, one of the fundamental questions is inequality, an old curse spread over the globe. Now, the issue is being recognized by a part of mainstream as a human rights issue. Doesn’t inequality take away people’s sovereign space?
This fact, the reigning system of creating and perpetuating poverty and equality, tells the state of people’s sovereignty: it’s decapitated.

The rich stash money in suitable bank accounts to avoid tax, The MNCs “innovate” ways and “discover” places, actually the ways were made and the places were created for them, where it is required to pay less or no tax. Corruption, theft of public money and banditry with natural resources go unquestioned in politics and the thieves and bandits go scot-free.

What do people find in this reality? People find their sovereignty lives in utopia.

Referring to the British and Dutch East India Companies, Adam Smith wrote: “Such exclusive companies, therefore, are nuisances in every respect; always more or less inconvenient to the countries in which they are established, and destructive to those which have the misfortune to fall under their government”. (The Wealth of Nations)

Today, don’t MNCs dwarf the “famous” East India Companies in terms of all the “good work” that Adam Smith referred? The task of dwarfing is not only in terms money power. It’s in terms of political power that is germinated by money power.

What about power of and dulcet deals by financial elites, joined together in companies organized with their democratic laws and rules, done with their transparency and accountability? Don’t findings from studies carried out by mainstream research organizations, reports of commissions/committees in a number of advanced capitalist democracies constituted after the Great Financial Crisis, and revelations in even bourgeois press confirm this? Where do they put people’s sovereignty? Does financialization allow people a sovereign space?

What happened with the, now known to public, Iraq lie – “Saddam’s WMD”? Has not been an entire society devastated? Did the Iraq lie upheld peoples’, of Iraq, and other countries including the countries involved, democratic rights, a sovereign space? What happens even in tiny and underdeveloped economies reigned by Lilliputian black maharajas?

Facts tell: People’s sovereignty takes a travel to oblivion. Developments in these societies retain no sovereign space of people. Even, space for organizing democratic struggle gets lost there.

With militarization and/or terrorization of society scope for claiming people’s sovereign space gets lost. No space for people’s sovereignty is left in a society when only war, devastation, death dominate the society. An invaded society turns its first victim while the invader’s society turns the next victim.

People’s sovereignty appears a blue moon as capital’s diabolic power impacts, disintegrates and distorts everything around, all aspects of people’s life, as arbitrary authority, in all forms, formal and informal, rules people’s lives.

This reality takes away people’s sovereign space, effectively a democratic space.

People are put in the eyes of all storms during political and economical crises. During periods of turbulence, political or economic, people are the first victim. They are made scapegoats whenever any crisis makes a “landfall”.

“Stupid, dolt”

The question comes: Who are the people?

“People” is one of the concepts most denigrated by mainstream, the privileged classes. The privileged persons consider people as stupid, dolt, onager, and all the sub-human characters the “sophisticated” taste and “deep” knowledge of the privileged provoke.

Prince Albert once said “the masses on which popular government rests only feel and do not think”. The prince followed James Harrington. About 300 years ago, Harrington perceived people as cannot see, but can feel. There were more or less similar other observers including Carlyle, Mill, Montesquieu, Burke. Disraeli once said: As a political expression, the people are ‘sheer nonsense’. To him people belonged to the realm of natural history than to that of politics. (Cecil S Emden, The People and the Constitution)

On the contrary, to Mao, people are the workers, peasantry, the poor, and all who oppose imperialism. “[M]asses”, Mao writes, “are the real heroes …” (“Preface and postscript to Rural Surveys”) He adds: “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force of world history.” (“On coalition government”)

Private persons turn people as they join together in collective acts and thoughts, in gaining experience and summarizing those, and in claiming and gaining spaces – sovereign space, democratic space.

And, as Alain Badiou, philosopher from France, tells: “An event is political if its material is collective, or if the event can only be attributed to a collective multiplicity.”

Thus people, in their collective interest, think politically, dream politically, and act politically.

People’s silence, seeming inactivity, tolerance, seeming apathy, temporary listless condition changes as quantity changes to quality; missteps are rectified as people gain experience; passive approach is replaced by active approach as reality pulls in burning questions of life; and passive sovereignty takes the shape of active sovereignty.

New leadership and initiatives emerge and hope is renewed. Societies, and times carry evidence of this qualitative change as contradictions can’t be resolved mechanically and through conspiracies, as false assertions can’t replace facts, as lie can’t subdue moral standing, as deceptions ultimately wear out, as “Man does not exist for the law, but the law exists for man”, and as people don’t die. History comes at juncture as people echo Cromwell: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you.”

Farooque Chowdhury is freelancer from Dhaka.

This article first appeared in New Age, Dhaka in its Victory Day issue on December 16, 2013.

Even Vladimir Lenin was surprised when the Russian Revolution began in 1917.

Is this just an interesting historical tidbit or a profound example of how fast seemingly stable political, social and economic systems can collapse?

The subject of how long lasting our current system really is comes up frequently in discussions about global warming and what we can do about it.

Usually the conversation goes something like this:

“Scientists tell us we’re getting close to the point of no return. We don’t have much time left to drastically cut our carbon emissions.”

“Yes, but corporation keep investing billions in the tar sands, in coal, in building ever more private automobiles. The oil sector, that’s where the money and jobs are.”

“Even the people who understand global warming is a problem need jobs.”

“Governments pay lip service to combating global warming, but in reality they follow the money too. Big corporations buy them off. They run everything.”

“The problem is capitalism. Capitalists require ever-expanding profits and will do anything to keep them flowing. That’s just the way the system is.”

“So what can we do about it?”

“Get rid of capitalism.”

“How likely is that?”

“I guess it depends on how many people come to the same conclusion and are willing to do what it takes to change the system.”

“In other words, it’s hopeless.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look around, people don’t care. They’re too busy shopping or worrying about their own private problems. People are too scared to join a union, let alone overthrow capitalism.”

“Things can change, very quickly.”

And that’s where the story about how the Russian Revolution surprised everyone comes up.

For those of us who understand the importance of acting quickly to reduce carbon emissions and that capitalism is incapable of dealing with this urgent problem, the question of how fast we could build a new, environmentally friendly economic system is critically important.

Is there time or are we cooked? Literally.

The answer depends, in large part, on one’s views about how “revolution” occurs.

If you believe that major change only happens after long years of organizing by dedicated, professional revolutionaries building a party that can lead the masses into a brave new future, then human beings today are probably like a lobster in a pot just before the chef turns on the burner: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. This water seems quite comfortable to me.” It’s doubtful if we have the time to develop the cadre necessary for taking over a system as complex and all-encompassing as world capitalism.
On the other hand, if you believe in the power and ability of ordinary people to rise up when confronted by a crisis that affects us all, then it is possible to be optimistic. If the system you want to build begins with working people around the world taking over the reins of the economy and replacing capitalist minority rule with economic democracy, then that could happen relatively quickly. Yes, it still requires “leaders” working hard, talking and organizing, but history offers many examples of ideas spreading quickly and then people acting upon them.

The critical element — the “objective conditions” — already exists. Capitalism itself has created an economy overwhelmingly dominated by social labor. This gives the working class the potential power to take over almost every part of the economy in the vast majority of major economies around the world.

Most people in most countries are workers. If we chose to do so, we could easily expand one-person, one-vote decision-making into every area where people work collectively, which is most of our economy. We could limit private property to what is truly private and doesn’t give an individual power over others. We could move to a system of social ownership where multiple democratic owning communities based on the appropriate level of government — local, state/provincial, national, international — replaced corporations. If we did these three things the system of greed that propels capitalists to earn profits, regardless of the consequences to our environment, would no longer exist.

Saving the planet from global warming and ensuring a future for our grandchildren are powerful incentives for billions of working people to participate in this necessary global movement.

Can it happen quickly enough? Yes.

Will it happen quickly enough? That is up to us.

Gary Engler is an elected union officer and co-author of the just released New Commune-ist Manifesto — Workers of the World It Really is Time to Unite, an updating of the original designed to provoke discussion about the future of unions and the Left.

Reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet's surface by geoengineering may not undo climate change after all. [1]

Axel Kleidon and Maik Renner, two German scientists used a simple energy balance analysis to explain how Earth's water cycle responds differently to heating by sunlight than it does to warming due to a stronger atmospheric greenhouse effect.

They show that this difference implies that reflecting sunlight to reduce temperatures may have unwanted effects on Earth's rainfall patterns.

The results have been published in Earth System Dynamics , an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Global warming alters Earth's water cycle since more water evaporates to the air as temperatures increase. Increased evaporation can dry out some regions while, at the same time, result in more rain falling in other areas due to the excess moisture in the atmosphere. The more water evaporates per degree of warming, the stronger the influence of increasing temperature on the water cycle. But the new study shows the water cycle does not react the same way to different types of warming.

Axel and Maik of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena , Germany , used a simple energy balance model to determine how sensitive the water cycle is to an increase in surface temperature due to a stronger greenhouse effect and to an increase in solar radiation.

The scientists predicted the response of the water cycle for the two cases and found that, in the former, evaporation increases by 2% per degree of warming while in the latter this number reaches 3%. This prediction confirmed results of much more complex climate models.

"These different responses to surface heating are easy to explain," says Kleidon, who uses a pot on the kitchen stove as an analogy. "The temperature in the pot is increased by putting on a lid or by turning up the heat -- but these two cases differ by how much energy flows through the pot," he says.

A stronger greenhouse effect puts a thicker 'lid' over Earth's surface but, if there is no additional sunlight (if we don't turn up the heat on the stove), extra evaporation takes place solely due to the increase in temperature. Turning up the heat by increasing solar radiation, on the other hand, enhances the energy flow through Earth's surface because of the need to balance the greater energy input with stronger cooling fluxes from the surface. As a result, there is more evaporation and a stronger effect on the water cycle.

In the new Earth System Dynamics study the scientists also show how these findings can have profound consequences for geoengineering.

Many geoengineering approaches aim to reduce global warming by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching Earth's surface (or, in the pot analogy, reduce the heat from the stove).

But when Kleidon and Renner applied their results to such a geoengineering scenario, they found out that simultaneous changes in the water cycle and the atmosphere cannot be compensated for at the same time. Therefore, reflecting sunlight by geoengineering is unlikely to restore the planet's original climate.

"It's like putting a lid on the pot and turning down the heat at the same time," explains Kleidon. "While in the kitchen you can reduce your energy bill by doing so, in the Earth system this slows down the water cycle with wide-ranging potential consequences," he says.

Kleidon and Renner's insight comes from looking at the processes that heat and cool Earth's surface and how they change when the surface warms. Evaporation from the surface plays a key role, but the researchers also took into account how the evaporated water is transported into the atmosphere.

They combined simple energy balance considerations with a physical assumption for the way water vapor is transported, and separated the contributions of surface heating from solar radiation and from increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to obtain the two sensitivities.

One of the referees for the paper commented: "it is a stunning result that such a simple analysis yields the same results as the climate models."

Humans threaten wetlands' ability to keep pace with sea-level rise

Coastal wetlands can resist rapid levels of sea-level rise. But humans could be sabotaging some of their best defenses, according to a Nature review paper published December 5 from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center . [2]

The threat of disappearing coastlines has alerted many to the dangers of climate change. Wetlands in particular -- with their ability to buffer coastal cities from floods and storms, and filter out pollution -- offer protections that could be lost in the future.

But, say co-authors Matt Kirwan and Patrick Megonigal, higher waters aren't the key factor in wetland demise. Thanks to an intricate system of feedbacks, wetlands are remarkably good at building up their soils to outpace sea level rise.

The real issue, they say, is that human structures such as dams and seawalls are disrupting the natural mechanisms that have allowed coastal marshes to survive rising seas since at least the end of the last Ice Age.

"Tidal marsh plants are amazing ecosystem engineers that can raise themselves upward if they remain healthy, and especially if there is sediment in the water," says co-author Patrick Megonigal of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. "We know there are limits to this, and worry those limits are changing as people change the environment."

"In a more natural world, we wouldn't be worried about marshes surviving the rates of sea level rise we're seeing today," says Kirwan, the study's lead author and a geologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "They would either build vertically at faster rates or else move inland to slightly higher elevations. But now we have to decide whether we'll let them."

Wetlands have developed several ways to build elevation to keep from drowning. Above ground, tidal flooding provides one of the biggest assists.

When marshes flood during high tide, mineral sediment settles out of the water, adding new soil to the ground. It's one of the more convenient response systems to today's threat:

When sea level rise accelerates and flooding occurs more often, marshes can react by building soil faster. Below ground, the growth and decay of plant roots adds organic matter -- an effect rising carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) seems to enhance.

Even erosion can work in favor of wetlands, as sediment lost at one marsh can be deposited on another. While a particular wetland may lose ground, the total wetland area may remain unchanged.

But everything has a threshold. If a wetland becomes so flooded that vegetation dies off, the positive feedback loops are lost.

Similarly, if sediment delivery to a wetland is cut off, that wetland can no longer build soil to outpace rising seas.

Direct human impacts, not rising seas or rising CO 2 , have the most power to alter those thresholds, the scientists report. Groundwater withdrawal and artificial drainage can cause the land to sink, as is happening right now in Chesapeake Bay . Because of this kind of subsidence, 8 of the world's 20 largest coastal cities are experiencing relative sea-level rise greater than climate change projections. Dams and reservoirs also prevent 20 percent of the global sediment load from reaching the coast.

Marshes on the Yangtze River Delta survived relative sea-level rise of more than 50 mm per year since the 7th century C.E., until the building of more than 50,000 dams cut off their supply of sediment and sped up erosion.

In addition to building vertically, marshes can also respond to sea-level rise by migrating landward.

But, the authors note, human activities have hindered this response as well. Conventional ways of protecting coastal property, such dykes and seawalls, keep wetlands from moving inland and create a "shoreline squeeze," Kirwan says. Because rates of marsh-edge erosion increase with rates of sea-level rise, the authors warn that the impacts of coastal barriers will accelerate with climate change.

?Natural defenses' are best protection from rising sea levels 

Citing a similar study finding Tim Radford reported [3]:

Insidious things like sea level rise, coastal subsidence and the loss of wetlands could bring the sea water coursing through city streets in the decades to come.

Jonathan Woodruff of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US and colleagues report in Nature that shorelines are increasingly at risk, and humans must adapt and learn to live with increasing hazard.

Many of the world's great cities are on low-lying coastal plains, or on river estuaries, and are therefore anyway at risk as sea levels rise because of global warming.

But human action too ? by damming rivers, by extracting ground water and by building massive structures on sedimentary soils ? has accelerated coastal subsidence. Add to this the possibility of more intense tropical cyclones as sea surface temperatures rise, and coastal cities face a stormy future.

?A rise in sea level of one meter for the New York City region would result in the present-day 100-year flood events occurring every three to 20 years?, warn Woodruff and his fellow scientists in their Nature study.

?Most engineered coastlines are not designed for this increase in extreme flood frequency, and the dominance of sea level rise and landscape dynamics on impacts by landfalling tropical cyclones must be acknowledged for effective planning and management of our future coastlines.?

The scientists reviewed nearly 100 research studies of coastal change.

They also noted that, according to an international register of disasters, more than 60% of economic losses ? around $400 bn ? occurred in the North Atlantic , one of the areas least at risk from tropical hurricanes. The lesson is that governments and civic authorities will need to think more carefully about future threats.

?Sea-level rise, severe storms, changing climate, erosion and policy issues are just some of the factors to assess in order to understand risk?, says another of the authors, Jennifer Irish of Virginia Tech College of Engineering.

?We reviewed just three of the physical factors ? tropical cyclone climatology, sea-level rise and shoreline change. If we look at them separately, we don't see how they are interconnected.

?But if we pull back to look at the whole picture, we stand a better chance of protecting our homes, roadways, energy and water networks, and the most critical and expensive infrastructure along the coastlines.?

Note:

[1] Story Source:

The story is based on materials provided by European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Journal Reference: A. Kleidon, M. Renner. A simple explanation for the sensitivity of the hydrologic cycle to global climate change. Earth System Dynamics Discussions, 2013; 4 (2): 853 DOI: 10.5194/esdd-4-853-2013

Source:

European Geosciences Union (EGU) (2013, December 5). Geoengineering approaches to reduce climate change unlikely to succeed. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 6, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2013/12/131205092049.htm

[2] Story Source:

The story is based on materials provided by Virginia Institute of Marine Science. The original article was written by Kristen Minogue, SERC.

Journal Reference: Matthew L. Kirwan, J. Patrick Megonigal. Tidal wetland stability in the face of human impacts and sea-level rise. Nature, 2013; 504 (7478): 53 DOI: 10.1038/nature12856

Source:

Virginia Institute of Marine Science (2013, December 4). Humans threaten wetlands' ability to keep pace with sea-level rise. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 5, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2013/12/131204132024.htm

[3] This article was produced by the Climate News Network.

RTCC.org, December 5, 2013, ??Natural defences' offer best protection from rising sea levels?, http://www.rtcc.org/2013/12/05/natural-defences-offer-best-protection-from-rising-sea-levels/

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?

The reason, of course, is climate change -- and just how bad it might be came home to me in the summer of 2010. I was climbing Mount Rainier in Washington State, taking the same route I had used in a 1994 ascent. Instead of experiencing the metal tips of the crampons attached to my boots crunching into the ice of a glacier, I was aware that, at high altitudes, they were still scraping against exposed volcanic rock. In the pre-dawn night, sparks shot from my steps.

The route had changed dramatically enough to stun me. I paused at one point to glance down the steep cliffs at a glacier bathed in soft moonlight 100 meters below. It took my breath away when I realized that I was looking at what was left of the enormous glacier I’d climbed in 1994, the one that -- right at this spot -- had left those crampons crunching on ice. I stopped in my tracks, breathing the rarefied air of such altitudes, my mind working hard to grasp the climate-change-induced drama that had unfolded since I was last at that spot.

I haven’t returned to Mount Rainier to see just how much further that glacier has receded in the last few years, but recently I went on a search to find out just how bad it might turn out to be. I discovered a set of perfectly serious scientists -- not the majority of all climate scientists by any means, but thoughtful outliers -- who suggest that it isn’t just really, really bad; it’s catastrophic. Some of them even think that, if the record ongoing releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, are aided and abetted by massive releases of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, life as we humans have known it might be at an end on this planet. They fear that we may be at -- and over -- a climate change precipice hair-raisingly quickly.

Mind you, the more conservative climate science types, represented by the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), paint scenarios that are only modestly less hair-raising, but let’s spend a little time, as I’ve done, with what might be called scientists at the edge and hear just what they have to say.

“We’ve Never Been Here as a Species”

“We as a species have never experienced 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and ecology at the University of Arizona and a climate change expert of 25 years, told me. “We’ve never been on a planet with no Arctic ice, and we will hit the average of 400 ppm... within the next couple of years. At that time, we’ll also see the loss of Arctic ice in the summers… This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last three million years.”

For the uninitiated, in the simplest terms, here’s what an ice-free Arctic would mean when it comes to heating the planet: minus the reflective ice cover on Arctic waters, solar radiation would be absorbed, not reflected, by the Arctic Ocean. That would heat those waters, and hence the planet, further. This effect has the potential to change global weather patterns, vary the flow of winds, and even someday possibly alter the position of the jet stream. Polar jet streams are fast flowing rivers of wind positioned high in the Earth’s atmosphere that push cold and warm air masses around, playing a critical role in determining the weather of our planet.

McPherson, who maintains the blog Nature Bats Last, added, “We’ve never been here as a species and the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet.”

While his perspective is more extreme than that of the mainstream scientific community, which sees true disaster many decades into our future, he’s far from the only scientist expressing such concerns. Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading Arctic expert at Cambridge University, has been measuring Arctic ice for 40 years, and his findings underscore McPherson’s fears. “The fall-off in ice volume is so fast it is going to bring us to zero very quickly,” Wadhams told a reporter. According to current data, he estimates “with 95% confidence” that the Arctic will have completely ice-free summers by 2018. (U.S. Navy researchers have predicted an ice-free Arctic even earlier -- by 2016.)

British scientist John Nissen, chairman of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (of which Wadhams is a member), suggests that if the summer sea ice loss passes “the point of no return,” and “catastrophic Arctic methane feedbacks” kick in, we’ll be in an “instant planetary emergency.”

McPherson, Wadham, and Nissen represent just the tip of a melting iceberg of scientists who are now warning us about looming disaster, especially involving Arctic methane releases. In the atmosphere, methane is a greenhouse gas that, on a relatively short-term time scale, is far more destructive than carbon dioxide (CO2). It is 23 times as powerful as CO2 per molecule on a 100-year timescale, 105 times more potent when it comes to heating the planet on a 20-year timescale -- and the Arctic permafrost, onshore and off, is packed with the stuff. “The seabed,” says Wadham, “is offshore permafrost, but is now warming and melting. We are now seeing great plumes of methane bubbling up in the Siberian Sea… millions of square miles where methane cover is being released.”

According to a study just published in Nature Geoscience, twice as much methane as previously thought is being released from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a two million square kilometer area off the coast of Northern Siberia. Its researchers found that at least 17 teragrams (one million tons) of methane are being released into the atmosphere each year, whereas a 2010 study had found only seven teragrams heading into the atmosphere.

The day after Nature Geoscience released its study, a group of scientists from Harvard and other leading academic institutions published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that the amount of methane being emitted in the U.S. both from oil and agricultural operations could be 50% greater than previous estimates and 1.5 times higher than estimates of the Environmental Protection Agency.

How serious is the potential global methane build-up? Not all scientists think it’s an immediate threat or even the major threat we face, but Ira Leifer, an atmospheric and marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the authors of the recent Arctic Methane study pointed out to me that “the Permian mass extinction that occurred 250 million years ago is related to methane and thought to be the key to what caused the extinction of most species on the planet.” In that extinction episode, it is estimated that 95% of all species were wiped out.

Also known as “The Great Dying,” it was triggered by a massive lava flow in an area of Siberia that led to an increase in global temperatures of six degrees Celsius. That, in turn, caused the melting of frozen methane deposits under the seas. Released into the atmosphere, it caused temperatures to skyrocket further. All of this occurred over a period of approximately 80,000 years.

We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” extinction rate. This event may already be comparable to, or even exceed, both the speed and intensity of the Permian mass extinction. The difference being that ours is human caused, isn’t going to take 80,000 years, has so far lasted just a few centuries, and is now gaining speed in a non-linear fashion.

It is possible that, on top of the vast quantities of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that continue to enter the atmosphere in record amounts yearly, an increased release of methane could signal the beginning of the sort of process that led to the Great Dying. Some scientists fear that the situation is already so serious and so many self-reinforcing feedback loops are already in play that we are in the process of causing our own extinction. Worse yet, some are convinced that it could happen far more quickly than generally believed possible -- even in the course of just the next few decades.

The Sleeping Giant Stirs

According to a NASA research report, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?”: “Over hundreds of millennia, Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon -- an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That's about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth's soils. In comparison, about 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850. Most of this carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable top soils within 10 feet (3 meters) of the surface.”

NASA scientists, along with others, are learning that the Arctic permafrost -- and its stored carbon -- may not be as permanently frosted as its name implies. Research scientist Charles Miller of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the principal investigator of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), a five-year NASA-led field campaign to study how climate change is affecting the Arctic's carbon cycle. He told NASA, "Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures -- as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years. As heat from Earth's surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic's carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming."

He fears the potential results should a full-scale permafrost melt take place. As he points out, “Changes in climate may trigger transformations that are simply not reversible within our lifetimes, potentially causing rapid changes in the Earth system that will require adaptations by people and ecosystems."

The recent NASA study highlights the discovery of active and growing methane vents up to 150 kilometers across. A scientist on a research ship in the area described this as a bubbling as far as the eye can see in which the seawater looks like a vast pool of seltzer. Between the summers of 2010 and 2011, in fact, scientists found that in the course of a year methane vents only 30 centimeters across had grown a kilometer wide, a 3,333% increase and an example of the non-linear rapidity with which parts of the planet are responding to climate disruption.

Miller revealed another alarming finding: "Some of the methane and carbon dioxide concentrations we've measured have been large, and we're seeing very different patterns from what models suggest," he said of some of CARVE’s earlier findings. "We saw large, regional-scale episodic bursts of higher than normal carbon dioxide and methane in interior Alaska and across the North Slope during the spring thaw, and they lasted until after the fall refreeze. To cite another example, in July 2012 we saw methane levels over swamps in the Innoko Wilderness that were 650 parts per billion higher than normal background levels. That's similar to what you might find in a large city."

Moving beneath the Arctic Ocean where methane hydrates -- often described as methane gas surrounded by ice -- exist, a March 2010 report in Science indicated that these cumulatively contain the equivalent of 1,000-10,000 gigatons of carbon. Compare this total to the 240 gigatons of carbon humanity has emitted into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began.

A study published in the prestigious journal Nature this July suggested that a 50-gigaton “burp” of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea is “highly possible at anytime.” That would be the equivalent of at least 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide.

Even the relatively staid IPCC has warned of such a scenario: "The possibility of abrupt climate change and/or abrupt changes in the earth system triggered by climate change, with potentially catastrophic consequences, cannot be ruled out. Positive feedback from warming may cause the release of carbon or methane from the terrestrial biosphere and oceans."

In the last two centuries, the amount of methane in the atmosphere has increased from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7 parts per million. The introduction of methane in such quantities into the atmosphere may, some climate scientists fear, make increases in the global temperature of four to six degrees Celsius inevitable.

The ability of the human psyche to take in and grasp such information is being tested. And while that is happening, yet more data continues to pour in -- and the news is not good.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

Consider this timeline:

* Late 2007: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announces that the planet will see a one degree Celsius temperature increase due to climate change by 2100.

* Late 2008: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research predicts a 2C increase by 2100.

* Mid-2009: The U.N. Environment Programme predicts a 3.5C increase by 2100. Such an increase would remove habitat for human beings on this planet, as nearly all the plankton in the oceans would be destroyed, and associated temperature swings would kill off many land plants. Humans have never lived on a planet at 3.5C above baseline.

* October 2009: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research releases an updated prediction, suggesting a 4C temperature increase by 2060.

* November 2009: The Global Carbon Project, which monitors the global carbon cycle, and the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a climate science report, predict 6C and 7C temperature increases, respectively, by 2100.

* December 2010: The U.N. Environment Programme predicts up to a 5C increase by 2050.

* 2012: The conservative International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook report for that year states that we are on track to reach a 2C increase by 2017.

* November 2013: The International Energy Agency predicts a 3.5C increase by 2035.

A briefing provided to the failed U.N. Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen in 2009 provided this summary: “The long-term sea level that corresponds to current CO2 concentration is about 23 meters above today’s levels, and the temperatures will be 6 degrees C or more higher. These estimates are based on real long-term climate records, not on models.”

On December 3rd, a study by 18 eminent scientists, including the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, showed that the long-held, internationally agreed upon target to limit rises in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius was in error and far above the 1C threshold that would need to be maintained in order to avoid the effects of catastrophic climate change.

And keep in mind that the various major assessments of future global temperatures seldom assume the worst about possible self-reinforcing climate feedback loops like the methane one.

“Things Are Looking Really Dire”

Climate-change-related deaths are already estimated at five million annually, and the process seems to be accelerating more rapidly than most climate models have suggested. Even without taking into account the release of frozen methane in the Arctic, some scientists are already painting a truly bleak picture of the human future. Take Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Neil Dawe, who in August told a reporter that he wouldn't be surprised if the generation after him witnessed the extinction of humanity. All around the estuary near his office on Vancouver Island, he has been witnessing the unraveling of “the web of life,” and “it’s happening very quickly.”

"Economic growth is the biggest destroyer of the ecology," Dawe says. "Those people who think you can have a growing economy and a healthy environment are wrong. If we don't reduce our numbers, nature will do it for us." And he isn’t hopeful humans will be able to save themselves. "Everything is worse and we're still doing the same things. Because ecosystems are so resilient, they don't exact immediate punishment on the stupid."

The University of Arizona’s Guy McPherson has similar fears. “We will have very few humans on the planet because of lack of habitat,” he says. Of recent studies showing the toll temperature increases will take on that habitat, he adds, “They are only looking at CO2 in the atmosphere.”

Here’s the question: Could some version of extinction or near-extinction overcome humanity, thanks to climate change -- and possibly incredibly fast? Similar things have happened in the past. Fifty-five million years ago, a five degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures seems to have occurred in just 13 years, according to a study published in the October 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A report in the August 2013 issue of Science revealed that in the near-term Earth’s climate will change 10 times faster than at any other moment in the last 65 million years.

“The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet,” climate scientist James Hansen has said. “There are potential irreversible effects of melting the Arctic sea ice. If it begins to allow the Arctic Ocean to warm up, and warm the ocean floor, then we’ll begin to release methane hydrates. And if we let that happen, that is a potential tipping point that we don’t want to happen. If we burn all the fossil fuels then we certainly will cause the methane hydrates, eventually, to come out and cause several degrees more warming, and it’s not clear that civilization could survive that extreme climate change.”

Yet, long before humanity has burned all fossil fuel reserves on the planet, massive amounts of methane will be released. While the human body is potentially capable of handling a six to nine degree Celsius rise in the planetary temperature, the crops and habitat we use for food production are not. As McPherson put it, “If we see a 3.5 to 4C baseline increase, I see no way to have habitat. We are at .85C above baseline and we’ve already triggered all these self-reinforcing feedback loops.”

He adds: “All the evidence points to a locked-in 3.5 to 5 degree C global temperature rise above the 1850 ‘norm’ by mid-century, possibly much sooner. This guarantees a positive feedback, already underway, leading to 4.5 to 6 or more degrees above ‘norm’ and that is a level lethal to life. This is partly due to the fact that humans have to eat and plants can’t adapt fast enough to make that possible for the seven to nine billion of us -- so we’ll die.”

If you think McPherson’s comment about lack of adaptability goes over the edge, consider that the rate of evolution trails the rate of climate change by a factor of 10,000, according to a paper in the August 2013 issue of Ecology Letters. Furthermore, David Wasdel, director of the Apollo-Gaia Project and an expert on multiple feedback dynamics, says, “We are experiencing change 200 to 300 times faster than any of the previous major extinction events.”

Wasdel cites with particular alarm scientific reports showing that the oceans have already lost 40% of their phytoplankton, the base of the global oceanic food chain, because of climate-change-induced acidification and atmospheric temperature variations. (According to the Center for Ocean Solutions: “The oceans have absorbed almost one-half of human-released CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Although this has moderated the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, it is chemically altering marine ecosystems 100 times more rapidly than it has changed in at least the last 650,000 years.”)

“This is already a mass extinction event,” Wasdel adds. “The question is, how far is it going to go? How serious does it become? If we are not able to stop the rate of increase of temperature itself, and get that back under control, then a high temperature event, perhaps another 5-6 degrees [C], would obliterate at least 60% to 80% of the populations and species of life on Earth.”

What Comes Next?

In November 2012, even Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group (an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries), warned that “a 4C warmer world can, and must be, avoided. Lack of action on climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today.”

A World Bank-commissioned report warned that we are indeed on track to a “4C world” marked by extreme heat waves and life-threatening sea-level rise.

The three living diplomats who have led U.N. climate change talks claim there is little chance the next climate treaty, if it is ever approved, will prevent the world from overheating. "There is nothing that can be agreed in 2015 that would be consistent with the 2 degrees," says Yvo de Boer, who was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a summit in Copenhagen crumbled. "The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."

Atmospheric and marine scientist Ira Leifer is particularly concerned about the changing rainfall patterns a recently leaked IPCC draft report suggested for our future: “When I look at what the models predicted for a 4C world, I see very little rain over vast swaths of populations. If Spain becomes like Algeria, where do all the Spaniards get the water to survive? We have parts of the world which have high populations which have high rainfall and crops that exist there, and when that rainfall and those crops go away and the country starts looking more like some of North Africa, what keeps the people alive?”

The IPCC report suggests that we can expect a generalized shifting of global rain patterns further north, robbing areas that now get plentiful rain of future water supplies. History shows us that when food supplies collapse, wars begin, while famine and disease spread. All of these things, scientists now fear, could happen on an unprecedented scale, especially given the interconnected nature of the global economy.

“Some scientists are indicating we should make plans to adapt to a 4C world,” Leifer comments. “While prudent, one wonders what portion of the living population now could adapt to such a world, and my view is that it’s just a few thousand people [seeking refuge] in the Arctic or Antarctica.”

Not surprisingly, scientists with such views are often not the most popular guys in the global room. McPherson, for instance, has often been labeled “Guy McStinction” -- to which he responds, “I’m just reporting the results from other scientists. Nearly all of these results are published in established, esteemed literature. I don’t think anybody is taking issue with NASA, or Nature, or Science, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Those] and the others I report are reasonably well known and come from legitimate sources, like NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], for example. I’m not making this information up, I’m just connecting a couple of dots, and it’s something many people have difficulty with.”

McPherson does not hold out much hope for the future, nor for a governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; nor does he expect the mainstream media to put much effort into reporting on all of this because, as he says, “There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.” The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a good bet, he believes, “because there is money in this, and as long as that’s the case, it is going to continue.”

Leifer, however, is convinced that there is a moral obligation never to give up and that the path to global destruction could be altered. “In the short term, if you can make it in the economic interests of people to do the right thing, it’ll happen very fast.” He offers an analogy when it comes to whether humanity will be willing to act to mitigate the effects of climate change: “People do all sorts of things to lower their risk of cancer, not because you are guaranteed not to get it, but because you do what you can and take out the health protections and insurance you need in order to try to lower your risk of getting it.”

The signs of a worsening climate crisis are all around us, whether we allow ourselves to see them or not. Certainly, the scientific community gets it. As do countless communities across the globe where the effects of climate change are already being experienced in striking ways and local preparations for climatic disasters, including increasingly powerful floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and storms are underway. Evacuations from low-lying South Pacific islands have already begun. People in such areas, out of necessity, are starting to try to teach their children how to adapt to, and live in, what we are causing our world to become.

My niece and nephews are doing something similar. They are growing vegetables in a backyard garden and their eight chickens provide more than enough eggs for the family. Their parents are intent on teaching them how to be ever more self-sustaining. But none of these heartfelt actions can mitigate what is already underway when it comes to the global climate.

I am 45 years old, and I often wonder how my generation will survive the impending climate crisis. What will happen to our world if the summer Arctic waters are indeed ice-free only a few years from now? What will my life look like if I live to experience a 3.5 Celsius global temperature increase?

Above all, I wonder how coming generations will survive.

Dahr Jamail has written extensively about climate change as well as the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. He is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. He is the author of two books: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He currently works for al-Jazeera English in Doha, Qatar.

A warmer world is expected to have severe consequences for global agriculture and food supply, reducing yields of major crops even as population and demand increases. A new analysis combining climate, agricultural, and hydrological models finds that shortages of freshwater used for irrigation could double the detrimental effects of climate change on agriculture. [1]

Given the present trajectory of GHG emissions, agricultural models estimate that climate change will directly reduce food production from maize, soybeans, wheat and rice by as much as 43 percent by the end of the 21st century. But hydrological models looking at the effect of warming climate on freshwater supplies project further agricultural losses, due to the reversion of 20 to 60 million hectares of currently irrigated fields back to rain-fed crops.

"It's a huge effect, and an effect that's basically on the same order of magnitude as the direct effect of climate change," said Joshua Elliott, a research scientist with the Computation Institute's Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy (RDCEP), Argonne National Laboratory, and lead author of the paper. "So the effect of limited irrigation availability in some regions could end up doubling the effect of climate change."

The research was led by Elliott and colleagues from the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), as part of the Inter-Sectoral Impacts Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP). The paper is among 12 featured in a special feature dedicated to ISI-MIP research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online December 16.

Agricultural models and hydrological models both incorporate the influence of climate, but are designed by different scientific communities for different purposes. While agricultural models simulate how temperature, precipitation and other climate factors may alter the yield for various crops, hydrological models seek to estimate water-related characteristics such as stream flow, water availability, and storm runoff.

The two types of models overlap in estimating the amount of water used for agricultural irrigation, by far the largest human use of freshwater in the world. But when Elliott and colleagues fed each type of model with the same climate model forecasts, the models produced dramatically different predictions about the future demand for freshwater irrigation

The researchers discovered discrepancies in how hydrological models incorporate processes such as the carbon cycle and crop water productivity when compared to agricultural models -- a finding that will help make existing models more accurate.

"This is absolutely the first study in which a multi-model ensemble of hydrological models was compared to a multi-model ensemble of crop models," Elliott said. "Several modeling groups have already changed the way that they are modeling the hydrological cycle with respect to crops because of the results of this paper."

The comparison also produced new insight about the potential agricultural consequences of climate change. Due to climate change alone, the models predicted a loss of between 400 and 2600 petacalories of food supply, 8 to 43 percent of present day levels.

But due to the decline in freshwater availability -- and the associated conversion of irrigated cropland to rain-fed -- the models predict an additional loss of 600 to 2900 petacalories, the researchers discovered.

However, while the models predict freshwater shortages in some areas of the world, such as the western United States, India and China, other regions may end up with a surplus of freshwater. Redistributing that excess water to restore or add irrigation to rain-fed crop areas could dampen some of the consequences of climate change upon irrigation and agriculture, Elliott said.

"We found that maximal usage of available surplus freshwater could end up ameliorating between 12 and 57 percent of the negative direct effects of climate change on food production," Elliott said. "However, there are lots of different political, economic and infrastructural reasons why you would consider that to be overly optimistic."
The results are among several major findings reported in the ISI-MIP special issue of PNAS by the AgMIP group, which conducted a "fast-track" exercise to generate new knowledge about climate change impacts on agriculture for the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC.

"Understanding the climate change implications of freshwater availability is key to the future food security goals of society," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, co-primary investigator of AgMIP. "The rigorous AgMIP multi-model approach is enabling advances in research on how climate change will affect agriculture worldwide and water is a vital component."

[1] Story Source:
The story is based on materials provided by Computation Institute.
Journal Reference:
Joshua Elliott, Delphine Deryng, Christoph Müller, Katja Frieler, Markus Konzmann, Dieter Gerten, Michael Glotter, Martina Flörke, Yoshihide Wada, Neil Best, Stephanie Eisner, Balázs M. Fekete, Christian Folberth, Ian Foster, Simon N. Gosling, Ingjerd Haddeland, Nikolay Khabarov, Fulco Ludwig, Yoshimitsu Masaki, Stefan Olin, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Alex C. Ruane, Yusuke Satoh, Erwin Schmid, Tobias Stacke, Qiuhong Tang, and Dominik Wisser. Constraints and potentials of future irrigation water availability on agricultural production under climate change. PNAS, December 16, 2013 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1222474110
Source:
Computation Institute (2013, December 16). Lost freshwater may double climate change effects on agriculture. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 17, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2013/12/131216154330.htm

Map by NOAA Climate.gov, based on data provided by Mike Steele and Wendy Ermold, University of Washington ; and the National Snow and Ice Data Center . Caption by Rebecca Lindsey and Adam Voiland. (From NASA's Earth Observatory) 

The Arctic continued to shift to a warmer, greener state in 2013. That was the headline from the latest Arctic Report Card, an annual update prepared by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and partner organizations such as NASA. Scientists are tracking a variety of environmental indicators, including air temperature, snow cover, sea ice extent, ocean temperature, vegetation growth, and wildlife behavior. In comparison to 2012, most indicators this year were closer to their long-term averages, but signs of change (fueled by long-term warming) were still present.

For instance, most surface waters within the Arctic Circle were warmer than average in summer 2013. This map shows where sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in August 2013 were warmer (red) or cooler (blue) than the 1982?2006 average. Sea ice extent is solid white. Although some areas experienced unusually cool SSTs in August 2013?especially in the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas?unusually high temperatures dominated most of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding straits and seas.

Warm waters in the eastern Arctic were probably related to an earlier-than-normal retreat of sea ice from the area and possibly an inflow of warmer water from the North Atlantic .

Retreating sea ice would have left the Kara and Barents Seas exposed to warm summer sunlight. Meanwhile, on the western side of the Arctic , sea ice retreat was later and less extensive than normal, contributing to cooler-than-average surface temperatures in the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas .

By September, surface waters around the Barents Sea Opening (between Svalbard and Scandinavia ) were about 5°F (3°C) warmer than they were in 2012. Southern Barents Sea temperatures reached 52°F (11°C), which is 9°F (5°C) warmer than the 1977?2006 average.

During a press conference about the report, University of Virginia scientist Howard Epstein emphasized that ongoing changes in the Arctic are not happening in a vacuum. ?The Arctic is not like Vegas,? he said. ?What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic . The major changes that we see in the sea ice, the spring snow cover extent, the increasing vegetation, the potential changes in greenhouse gases fluxes?these are all things that have implications that extend beyond just the Arctic to the rest of the world.?

Reference

NOAA Climate (2013, December 12) 2013 Arctic Report Card: Arctic boundary waters warmer than average in summer. Accessed December 12, 2013 .

[1] USA.gov, NASA, Global Climate Change, December 16, 2013, Earth Science Communications Team, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory / California Institute of Technology, http://climate.nasa.gov/news/1014

Latest climate and biosphere modelling suggests that the length of time carbon remains in vegetation during the global carbon cycle -- known as 'residence time' -- is the key "uncertainty" in predicting how Earth's terrestrial plant life -- and consequently almost all life -- will respond to higher CO2 levels and global warming, say researchers.[1]

Carbon will spend increasingly less time in vegetation as the negative impacts of climate change take their toll through factors such as increased drought levels -- with carbon rapidly released back into the atmosphere where it will continue to add to global warming.

Researchers say that extensive modelling shows a four degree temperature rise will be the threshold beyond which CO2 will start to increase more rapidly, as natural carbon 'sinks' of global vegetation become "saturated" and unable to sequester any more CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere.

They call for a "change in research priorities" away from the broad-stroke production of plants and towards carbon 'residence time' -- which is little understood -- and the interaction of different kinds of vegetation in ecosystems such as carbon sinks.

Carbon sinks are natural systems that drain and store CO2 from the atmosphere, with vegetation providing many of the key sinks that help chemically balance the world -- such as the Amazon rainforest and the vast, circumpolar Boreal forest.

As the world continues to warm, consequent events such as Boreal forest fires and mid-latitude droughts will release increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere -- pushing temperatures ever higher.

Initially, higher atmospheric CO2 will encourage plant growth as more CO2 stimulates photosynthesis, say researchers. But the impact of a warmer world through drought will start to negate this natural balance until it reaches a saturation point.

The modelling shows that global warming of four degrees will result in Earth's vegetation becoming "dominated" by negative impacts -- such as 'moisture stress', when plant cells have too little water -- on a global scale.

Carbon-filled vegetation 'sinks' will likely become saturated at this point, they say, flat-lining further absorption of atmospheric CO2. Without such major natural CO2 drains, atmospheric carbon will start to increase more rapidly -- driving further climate change.

The researchers say that, in light of the new evidence, scientific focus must shift away from productivity outputs -- the generation of biological material -- and towards the "mechanistic levels" of vegetation function, such as how plant populations interact and how different types of photosyntheses will react to temperature escalation.

Particular attention needs to be paid to the varying rates of carbon 'residence time' across the spectrum of flora in major carbon sinks -- and how this impacts the "carbon turnover," they say.

The Cambridge research, led by Dr Andrew Friend from the University's Department of Geography, is part of the 'Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project' (ISI-MIP) -- a unique community-driven effort to bring research on climate change impacts to a new level, with the first wave of research published today in a special issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Global vegetation contains large carbon reserves that are vulnerable to climate change, and so will determine future atmospheric CO2," said Friend, lead author of this paper. "The impacts of climate on vegetation will affect biodiversity and ecosystem status around the world."

"This work pulls together all the latest understanding of climate change and its impacts on global vegetation -- it really captures our understanding at the global level."

The ISI-MIP team used seven global vegetation models, including Hybrid -- the model that Friend has been honing for fifteen years -- and the latest IPCC modelling. These were run exhaustively using supercomputers -- including Cambridge's own Darwin computer, which can easily accomplish overnight what would take a PC months -- to create simulations of future scenarios:

"We use data to work out the mathematics of how the plant grows -- how it photosynthesises, takes-up carbon and nitrogen, competes with other plants, and is affected by soil nutrients and water -- and we do this for different vegetation types," explained Friend.

"The whole of the land surface is understood in 2,500 km2 portions. We then input real climate data up to the present and look at what might happen every 30 minutes right up until 2099."

While there are differences in the outcomes of some of the models, most concur that the amount of time carbon lingers in vegetation is the key issue, and that global warming of four degrees or more -- currently predicted by the end of this century -- marks the point at which carbon in vegetation reaches capacity.

"In heatwaves, ecosystems can emit more CO2 than they absorb from the atmosphere," said Friend. "We saw this in the 2003 European heatwave when temperatures rose six degrees above average -- and the amount of CO2 produced was sufficient to reverse the effect of four years of net ecosystem carbon sequestration."

For Friend, this research should feed into policy: "To make policy you need to understand the impact of decisions.

"The idea here is to understand at what point the increase in global temperature starts to have serious effects across all the sectors, so that policy makers can weigh up impacts of allowing emissions to go above a certain level, and what mitigation strategies are necessary."

[1] Story Source:

The story is based on materials provided by University of Cambridge, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS. The original story is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.
Journal Reference:

Andrew D. Friend, Wolfgang Lucht, Tim T. Rademacher, Rozenn Keribin, Richard Betts, Patricia Cadule, Philippe Ciais, Douglas B. Clark, Rutger Dankers, Pete D. Falloon, Akihiko Ito, Ron Kahana, Axel Kleidon, Mark R. Lomas, Kazuya Nishina, Sebastian Ostberg, Ryan Pavlick, Philippe Peylin, Sibyll Schaphoff, Nicolas Vuichard, Lila Warszawski, Andy Wiltshire, and F. Ian Woodward. Carbon residence time dominates uncertainty in terrestrial vegetation responses to future climate and atmospheric CO2. PNAS, December 16, 2013 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1222477110

Source:
University of Cambridge (2013, December 16). Global warming: Four degree rise will end vegetation 'carbon sink', research suggests. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 17, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2013/12/131216154851.htm

Sixty-nine countries are already facing extremely tough competition for water, according to a study by the World Resources Institute.

According to the study, the first to rank countries based on water scarcity, 37% of the countries experience high water stress, meaning at least 40% of their water is taken up by industrial, agricultural and residential use.

A total of 17 countries achieved the highest possible score, with over 80% of their water resources used up each year. While it is unsurprising that the famously arid Western Sahara is on this list, Singapore is renowned for its positive water management.

Other countries that face severe water stress include Bahrain, Barbados and the United Arab Emirates. China and the US were roughly on a par, coming in at 70 and 72 respectively. Australia was at 45 on the list, with the UK at 76.

In 170th place, Croatia is the least water stressed country in Europe, and the least stressed countries overall are Benin, Burundi, Central African Republic, Rwanda and South Sudan.

An interactive map developed by the researchers spell out which countries suffer from the smallest water resources.

Indicators

The rankings are based on five indicators. This includes measuring a country’s baseline water stress, or how much water is removed every year from rivers, streams and shallow aquifers for domestic, agricultural and industrial uses.

For highest scoring countries, this means more than 80% of their water is withdrawn annually, leaving farms, residents and companies extremely vulnerable to even the slightest change in water supply.

The study also based its findings on the variation in water supply between years and between months of the year, as well as the number of floods recorded from 1985 to 2011 and the intensity of droughts between 1901 and 2008.

The researchers at the WRI are the first to rank water stress on a countrywide scale. They points out that, while local measures are useful in terms of providing very specific detail, a view of the national situation is key for decisions affecting the economy, environment and communities.

They point out that commercial banks, for example, evaluate certain types of risks at a country level, and without sufficient data water scarcity faces being completely ignored when they look at risks to their investments.

“Yet until now, scant country-level water risk data existed,” write Paul Reig, Andrew Maddocks and Francis Gassert, the authors of the report, in a blog post.

Water management

The report also highlights that, even though some countries may experience from water stress, with correct management systems in place, they need not suffer as a result.

For instance, good water management means that supply of water in Singapore far outstrips demand, in spite of the fact that the country has no freshwater lakes or aquifers.

The country uses advanced rainwater capture systems to supply 20% of its water, grey water reuse for 30%, as well as importing 40% from Malaysia. An additional 10% is provided through desalination. This enables its residents to draw on a stable supply of water, in spite of the scarce natural resources.

Since 1998 the global temperature has risen more slowly than before. Given the many explanations for colder temperatures discussed in the media and scientific literature (La Niña, heat uptake of the oceans, arctic data gap, etc.) one could jokingly ask why no new ice age is here yet. This fails to recognize, however, that the various ingredients are small and not simply additive. Here is a small overview and attempt to explain how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together.

Figure 1 The global near-surface temperatures (annual values at the top, decadal means at the bottom) in the three standard data sets HadCRUT4 (black), NOAA (orange) and NASA GISS (light blue). Graph: IPCC 2013.

First an important point: the global temperature trend over only 15 years is neither robust nor predictive of longer-term climate trends. I’ve repeated this now for six years in various articles, as this is often misunderstood. The IPCC has again made this clear (Summary for Policy Makers p. 3):

Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends.

You can see this for yourself by comparing the trend from mid-1997 to the trend from 1999 : the latter is more than twice as large: 0.07 instead of 0.03 degrees per decade (HadCRUT4 data).

Likewise for data uncertainty: the trends of HadCRUT and NASA data hardly differ in the long term, but they do over the last 15 years. And the small correction proposed recently by Cowtan & Way to compensate for the data gap in the Arctic almost does not change the HadCRUT4 long-term trend, but it changes that over the last 15 years by a factor of 2.5.

Therefore, it is a (by some deliberately promoted) misunderstanding to draw conclusions from such a short trend about future global warming, let alone climate policy. To illustrate this point, the following graph shows one simulation from the CMIP3 model ensemble:

Figure 2 Temperature evolution in a model simulation with the MRI model. Other models also show comparable “hiatuses” due to natural climate variability. This is one of the standard simulations carried out within the framework of CMIP3 for the IPCC 2007 report. Graph: Roger Jones.

In this model calculation, there is a “warming pause” in the last 15 years, but in no way does this imply that further global warming is any less. The long-term warming and the short-term “pause” have nothing to do with each other, since they have very different causes. By the way this example refutes the popular “climate skeptics” claim that climate models cannot explain such a “hiatus” – more on that later.

Now for the causes of the lesser trend of the last 15 years. Climate change can have two types of causes: external forcing or internal variability in the climate system.

External forcing: the sun, volcanoes & co.

The possible external drivers include the shading of the sun by aerosol pollution of the atmosphere by volcanoes (Neely et al., 2013) or Chinese power plants (Kaufmann et al. 2011). Second, a reduction of the greenhouse effect of CFCs because these gases have been largely banned in the Montreal Protocol (Estrada et al., 2013). And third, the transition from solar maximum in the first half to a particularly deep and long solar minimum in the second half of the period – this is evidenced by measurements of solar activity, but can explain only part of the slowdown (about one third according to our correlation analysis).

It is likely that all these factors indeed contributed to a slowing of the warming, and they are also additive – according to the IPCC report (Section 9.4) about half of the slowdown can be explained by a slower increase in radiative forcing. A problem is that the data on the net radiative forcing are too imprecise to better quantify its contribution. Which in turn is due to the short period considered, in which the changes are so small that data uncertainties play a big role, unlike for the long-term climate trends.

The latest data and findings on climate forcings are not included in the climate model runs because of the long lead time for planning and executing such supercomputer simulations. Therefore, the current CMIP5 simulations run from 2005 in scenario mode (see Figure 6) rather than being driven by observed forcings. They are therefore driven e.g. with an average solar cycle and know nothing of the particularly deep and prolonged solar minimum 2005-2010.

Internal variability: El Niño, PDO & co.

The strongest internal variability in the climate system on this time scale is the change from El Niño to La Niña – a natural, stochastic “seesaw” in the tropical Pacific called ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation).

The fact that El Niño is important for our purposes can already be seen by how much the trend changes if you leave out 1998 (see above): El Niño years are particularly warm (see chart), and 1998 was the strongest El Niño year since records began. Further evidence of the crucial importance of El Niño is that after correcting the global temperature data for the effect of ENSO and solar cycles by a simple correlation analysis, you get a steady warming trend without any recent slowdown (see next graph and Foster and Rahmstorf 2011). ENSO is responsible for two thirds of the correction. And if you nudge a climate model in the tropical Pacific to follow the observed sequence of El Niño and La Niña (rather than generating such events itself in random order), then the model reproduces the observed global temperature evolution including the “hiatus” (Kosaka and Xie 2013) .

One can also ask how the observed warming fits the earlier predictions of the IPCC . The result looks like this (Rahmstorf et al 2011):

Figure 3 Comparison of global temperature (average over 5 data sets, including 2 satellite series) with the projections from the 3rd and 4 IPCC reports. Pink: the measured values. Red: data after adjusting for ENSO, volcanoes and solar activity by a multivariate correlation analysis. The data are shown as a moving average over 12 months. From Rahmstorf et al. 2012.

And what about the ocean heat storage ? That is no additional effect, but part of the mechanism by which El Niño years are warm and La Niña years are cold at the Earth’s surface. During El Niño the ocean releases heat, during La Niña it stores more heat. The often-cited data on the heat storage in the ocean are therefore just further evidence that El Niño plays a crucial role for the “pause”.

Leading U.S. climatologist Kevin Trenberth has studied this for twenty years and has just published a detailed explanatory article. Trenberth emphasizes the role of long-term variations of ENSO, called pacific-decadal oscillation (PDO). Put simply: phases with more El Niño and phases with predominant La Niña conditions (as we’ve had recently) may persist for up to two decades in the tropical Pacific. The latter brings a somewhat slower warming at the surface of our planet, because more heat is stored deeper in the ocean. A central point here: even if the surface temperature stagnates our planet continues to take up heat. The increasing greenhouse effect leads to a radiation imbalance: we absorb more heat from the sun than we emit back into space. 90% of this heat ends up in the ocean due to the high heat capacity of water. The fact that the ocean continues to heat up, without pause, demonstrates that the greenhouse effect has not subsided, as we have discussed here.

How important the effect of El Niño is will be revealed at the next decent El Niño event. I have already predicted last year that after the next El Niño a new record in global temperature will be reached again – a forecast that probably will be confirmed or falsified soon.

The Arctic data gap

Recently, Cowtan & Way have shown that recent warming was underestimated in the HadCRUT data. After using satellite data and a smart statistical method to fill gaps in the network of weather stations, the global warming trend since 1998 is 0.12 degrees per decade – that is only a quarter less than the long-term trend of 0.16 degrees per decade measured since 1980. Awareness of this data gap is not new – Simmons et al. have shown already in 2010 that global warming is underestimated in the HadCRUT data, and we have discussed the Arctic data hole repeatedly since 2008 at RealClimate. NASA GISS has always filled the data gaps by interpolation, albeit with a simpler method, and accordingly the GISTEMP data show hardly a slowdown of warming.

The spatial pattern

Cohen et al. have shown two years ago that it is mainly the recent cold winters in Eurasia that have contributed to the flattening of the global warming curve (see figure).

Figure 4 Observed temperature trends in the winter months. Despite the significant global warming in the annual mean, there was a winter cooling in Eurasia. CRUTem3 data (land only!), from Cohen et al. 2012.

They argue that an explanation for the “pause” in global warming would have to explain this particular pattern. But this is not compelling: there could be two independent mechanisms superimposed. One that dampens global warming – which would have to be explained by the global energy balance. And a second one that explains the cold Eurasian winters, but without affecting the global mean temperature. I think the latter is likely – these recent cold winters are part of the much-discussed “warm Arctic – cold continents” pattern (see, eg, Overland et al 2011) and could be related to the dwindling ice cover on the Arctic Ocean, as we explained here. Since the heat is just moved around, with Eurasian cold linked to a correspondingly warmer Arctic, this hardly affects the global mean temperature – unless you’re looking at a data set with a large data gap in the Arctic …

What does it add up to?

How does all that fit together now? As described above, I think (just like Trenberth) that natural variability, in particular ENSO and PDO, is the main reason the recent slower warming. From the perspective of the planetary energy balance heat storage in the ocean is the key mechanism.

If the warming is steady after adjusting for ENSO, volcanoes and solar cycles, does the additional correction for the Arctic data gap by Cowtan & Way mean that the warming after these adjustments has even accelerated? That could be, but only by a small amount. As you can see in Figure 6 of our paper (Foster and Rahmstorf), the slowdown is gone after said adjustment in the GISS data and the two satellites series, but there still is some slowdown in the two data sets with the Arctic gap, ie HadCRUT and NCDC. Adding the trend correction by 0.08 degrees per decade from Cowtan & Way to our ENSO-adjusted HadCRUT trend from 1998, you end up at about 0.2 degrees per decade, practically the same value as we got for the GISS data. If one further adds the effect of the above forcings (without the solar activity already accounted for) this would add a few hundredths of a degree. The result would be a bit faster warming than over the entire period since 1980, but probably less than the 0.29 °C per decade measured over 1992-2006. Nothing to get excited about. Especially since based on the model calculations you’d expect anyway trends around 0.2 degrees per decade, because models predict not a constant but a gradually accelerating warming. Which brings us to the comparison with models.

Comparison with models

Figure 5 Comparison of the three measured data sets shown at the outset with earlier IPCC projections from the first (FAR), 2nd (SAR) 3rd (TAR) and 4th (AR4) IPCC report, as well as with the CMIP3 model ensemble. As you can see the data move within the projected ranges. Source: IPCC AR5, Figure 1.4. (Small note: “climate skeptics” brought an earlier, erroneous draft version of this graphic to the public, although it was marked in block letters as a temporary placeholder by IPCC.)

When comparing data with models, one needs to understand a key point: the models also produce internal variations, including ENSO, but as this (similar to the weather in the models) is a stochastic process, the El Niños and La Niñas are distributed randomly over the years. Therefore, only in rare cases a model will randomly produce a sequence that is similar to the observed sequence with reduced warming from 1998 to 2012. There are such models – see the first image above – but most show such phases of slow warming or “hiatus” at other times.

The IPCC has therefore never tried to predict the climate evolution over 15 years, because that’s just too much influenced by random internal variability (such as ENSO), which we cannot predict (at least as yet).

However, all models show such variability – no one who understands this issue could have been surprised that there can be such hiatus phases. They’ve also occurred in the past, for example from 1982, as Trenberth shows in his Figure 4.

The following graph shows a comparison of observational data with the CMIP5 ensemble of model experiments that have been made for the current IPCC report. The graph shows that the El Niño year 1998 is at the top and the last two cool La Niña years are at the bottom of the model projection range (for the various reasons explained above). However, the temperatures (at least according to the data of Cowtan & Way) are within the range which is spanned by 90% of the models.

Figure 6 Comparison of 42 CMIP5 simulations with the observational data. The HadCRUT4 value for 2013 is provisional of course, still without November and December. (Source: DeepClimate.org)

So there is no evidence for model errors here (for more on this see this article) . This is also no evidence for a lower climate sensitivity, even if this was proposed some time ago by Otto et al. (2013). Trenberth et al. suggest that even the choice of a different data set of ocean heat content would have increased the climate sensitivity estimate of Otto et al. by 0.5 degrees. In addition, Otto et al. used the HadCRUT4 temperature data with its particularly low recent warming. With an honest appraisal of the full uncertainty, also in the forcing, one must come to the conclusion that such a short period is not sufficient to draw conclusions about the climate sensitivity.

Conclusion

Global temperature has in recent years increased more slowly than before, but this is within the normal natural variability that always exists, and also within the range of predictions by climate models – even despite some cool forcing factors such as the deep solar minimum not included in the models. There is therefore no reason to find the models faulty. There is also no reason to expect less warming in the future – in fact, perhaps rather the opposite as the climate system will catch up again due its natural oscillations, e.g. when the Pacific decadal oscillation swings back to its warm phase. Even now global temperatures are very high again – in the GISS data, with an anomaly of + 0.77 °C November was warmer than the previous record year of 2010 (+ 0.67 °), and it was the warmest November on record since 1880.

PS: This article was translated from the German original at RC’s sister blog KlimaLounge. KlimaLounge has been nominated as one of 20 blogs for the award of German science blog of the year 2013. If you’d like to vote for us: simply go to this link, select KlimaLounge in the list and press the “vote” button.

Stefan Rahmstorf is a physicist and oceanographer by training, Stefan Rahmstorf has moved from early work in general relativity theory to working on climate issues. He has done research at the New Zealand Oceanographic Institute, at the Institute of Marine Science in Kiel and since 1996 at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany (in Potsdam near Berlin). His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change, past and present. In 1999 Rahmstorf was awarded the $ 1 million Centennial Fellowship Award of the US-based James S. McDonnell foundation. Since 2000 he teaches physics of the oceans as a professor at Potsdam University. Rahmstorf is a member of the Advisory Council on Global Change of the German government and of the Academia Europaea. He is a lead author of the paleoclimate chapter of the 4th assessment report of the IPCC.

References

1. K. Cowtan, and RG Way, “Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends”, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, pp. n / an / a, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/qj.2297

2. RR Neely, OB Toon, S. Solomon, J. Vernier, C. Alvarez, JM English, KH Rosenlof, MJ Mills, CG Bardeen, JS Daniel, and JP Thayer, ”
Recent Increases in anthropogenic SO2from Asia have minimal impact on stratospheric aerosol
“Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 40, pp. 999-1004, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/grl.50263

3. RK Kaufmann, H. Kauppi, ML man, and JH Stock, “Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed-temperature 1998-2008″, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 108 pp. 11790-11793, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1102467108

4. F. Estrada, P. Perron, and B. Martínez-López, “Statistically derived Contributions of diverse human Influences to twentieth-century temperature changes”, Nature Geoscience, vol. 6, pp. 1050-1055, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1999

5. G. Foster, and S. Rahmstorf, “Global temperature evolution 1979-2010″, Environmental Research Letters, vol. 6, pp. 044 022, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022

6. Y. Kosaka, and S. Xie, “Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling”, Nature, vol. 501 pp. 403-407, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12534

7 . S. Rahmstorf, G. Foster, and A. Cazenave, “Comparing Projections to climate observations up to 2011,” Environmental Research Letters, vol. 7, pp. 044 035, in 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044035

8. AJ Simmons, KM Willett, PD Jones, PW Thorne, and DP Dee, “Low-frequency variations in surface atmospheric humidity, temperature, and precipitation: Inferences from reanalyses and monthly gridded observational data sets”, Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 115, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2009JD012442

9. JL Cohen, JC Furtado, MA Barlow, VA Alexeev, and JE Cherry, “Arctic warming, Increasing snow cover and wide spread boreal winter cooling”, Environmental Research Letters, vol. 7, pp. 014 007, in 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/7/1/014007

10. JE Overland, KR Wood, and M. Wang, “Warm Arctic-cold continents: climate impacts of the newly open Arctic Sea”, Polar Research, vol. 30, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/polar.v30i0.15787

11. A. Otto, Otto FEL, O. Boucher, J. Church, G. Hegerl, PM Forster, NP Gillett, J. Gregory, GC Johnson, R. Knutti, N. Lewis, U. Lohmann, J. Marotzke, G. Myhre, D. Shindell, B. Stevens, and MR Allen, “Energy budget constraints on climate response”, Nature Geoscience, vol. 6, pp. 415-416, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1836

A conceptualized image of a wind-powered, remotely controlled ship that could seed clouds over the ocean to deflect sunlight. (Credit: John MacNeill)

Spraying sulfates into the stratosphere does not benefit everyone. Should it be applied as a global public good? Is accepting geoengineering as a necessary evil ignores other science or policy options? What is the Oxford Principle? Should it be accepted?

These are only a few of many opinions and questions scientists are raising. It is also part of debates on the issue of geoengineering now going on in the scientist community around the world. Public should be informed of the issue.

Hacking Earth's climate to counteract global warming -- a subject that elicits strong reactions from both sides -- is the topic of a December special issue of the journal Climatic Change.

A dozen research papers include the most detailed description yet of the proposed Oxford Principles to govern geoengineering research, as well as surveys on the technical hurdles, ethics and regulatory issues related to deliberately manipulating the planet's climate.

University of Washington researchers led the three-year project to gather leading thinkers and publish a snapshot of a field that they say is rapidly gaining credibility in the scientific community.

"In the past five years or so, geoengineering has moved from the realm of quackery to being the subject of scientific research," said co-editor Rob Wood, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. "We wanted to contribute to a serious intellectual discourse."

Creating clouds over the ocean that would reflect back sunlight is the subject of a chapter by Wood, whose research is on the interaction among air pollution, clouds and climate. He and co-author Tom Ackerman, a UW atmospheric sciences professor, look at what it would take to test the idea with a field experiment.

"I don't want to prove it right, I just want to know if it's feasible," Wood said. "If you look at the projections for how much Earth's air temperature is supposed to warm over the next century, it is frightening. We should at least know the options. Is geoengineering feasible if there were to be what people call a 'climate emergency'?"

Also explored in the journal issue is the idea of injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere, subject of a 2006 paper in Climatic Change by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen and central to Seattle entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold's proposed StratoShield.

Yet another idea is iron fertilization of ocean microbes, though Wood said preliminary tests suggest this is not as successful at drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as its proponents had originally thought.

How to govern geoengineering is a topic of hot debate.

In one paper, UK authors flesh out the so-called Oxford Principles, which suggest how geoengineering could be regulated as a global public good. The five principles described in the paper concern the research, publication, assessment and deployment of geoengineering techniques.

Many of the authors spoke at the UW during a 2011 seminar series, and more attended a 2012 workshop where they developed their paper ideas.

While discussions were civil, Wood said, the contributors didn't all agree.

A UW philosopher questions whether geoengineering can even be described in the Oxford Principles as a global public good.

"Just spraying sulfates into the stratosphere is not the kind of thing that necessarily benefits everyone, so in that sense it seems a mistake to call it a global public good," said co-editor Stephen Gardiner, a UW philosophy professor who has written a book on ethics and climate change.

There are decisions about how to conduct sulfate spraying, he writes, and potential tradeoffs between short-term benefits and long-term risks.

Gardiner also questions whether something should be done in people's benefit but without their permission, and if accepting geoengineering as a necessary evil ignores other science or policy options.

He's not the only social scientist to be looking at climate issues.

"A lot of people, from across the academy, are getting interested in the Anthropocene -- the idea that we may have entered a new geological era where human influence is a dominant feature, and what that means for various issues," Gardiner said.

The collection aims to prompt a serious academic discussion the editors say has so far been lacking.

"It's an interdisciplinary discussion with an emphasis on the research angle -- whether and how we should be researching geoengineering," said co-editor Lauren Hartzell-Nichols, a UW lecturer in philosophy. "We hope it helps people think about this issue in a more interdisciplinary and integrated way."

Story Source:

The story is based on materials provided by University of Washington . The original article was written by Hannah Hickey.

Source:

University of Washington (2013, December 17). Hack the planet? Geoengineering research, ethics, governance explored. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 19, 2013 , from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2013/12/131217155335.htm

There's not really any competition for the number one protest this year. When Greenpeace decided to take on Russian oil giant Gazprom in September, events escalated quickly. The 30 activists were arrested, their ship was seized, and charges of piracy and hooliganism were brought against them. For a while, it seemed like they could be imprisoned for up to 15 years, raising the stakes of environmental protest, and showing just how far Russia is willing to go to protect its oil interests. But as of today, it looks like they'll be home for Christmas.

Source: RTCC

Anti-fracking protesters besiege Balcombe

With 2013 having earned the epithet ?the year of fracking', no protest list would be complete without a mention of the festivities that took place in Balcombe this summer. What started as something resembling an English tea party quickly transformed into the biggest UK demonstration against fracking so far, culminating in the arrest of Green Party MP Caroline Lucas.

Reverend Billy and his golden toads

When Billy Talen entered JP Morgan Chase impersonating a Baptist preacher with eight life sized golden toads in tow, America 's largest bank was not amused. The actor, adopting the moniker the Rev Billy, delivered a ?sermon' in the foyer on the company's history of financing fossil fuel intensive projects. He was arrested, and now faces a year in prison.

Yeb Sano with others fasting at Warsaw climate negotiations (Source: 350.org)

Fasting for the climate

In his tearful opening speech at the UN climate talks in November, Filipino Climate Change Commissioner Yeb Sano announced that he would fast throughout the two-week negotiations unless there was evidence of meaningful action. Spurred on by the disastrous typhoon Haiyan, he was joined by other NGO representatives, in a mass expression of the frustration that often accompanies the sluggish UN process.

Liberate Tate

One of this year's spookier displays of moral outrage took place in the UK 's Tate Gallery, when performance group Liberate Tate marched through BP-sponsored exhibition of chronological artwork wearing black veils, chanting the carbon dioxide levels at each milestone. The performance started in the ?1840' room with the beginning of industrialization, and ended with contemporary art, created as levels hit 400 parts per million for the first time.

NGOs walk out of Warsaw

Leading environmental groups from across the world decided to voluntarily withdraw from the UN climate talks in Warsaw this year, deciding that a better use of their time would be to mobilize people to push governments for more serious action. The walkout was the first of its kind at the international negotiations, where bitter debates can hamper progress towards speedy action on climate change.

Spanish protesters throw pies

In a choice of tactics rarely seen outside of the circus ring these days, four Spanish activists threw cream pies into the face of one of the country's regional governors in November to protest the development of a high speed rail network that threatens forest land in the Pyrenees. The stunt quickly became less amusing ? the protesters now face up to nine years in prison, following a trial their lawyers say is reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.

America 's largest climate rally

Over 35,000 marched to US president Barack Obama's doorstep in February in what is America 's largest climate change protest to date. Protesters turned up from over 30 states for the rally, organized by campaign group 350, to push the President for firmer climate action and to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Milk and coal

Like Margaret Thatcher in reverse, New Zealand activists handed out dairy products with a lump of coal to Auckland residents in March, protesting the partnership between dairy company Fonterra and coal company Glencoal. The supplies were supposed to highlight how the dairy products are produced by mining and burning coal.

Greenpeace scales the Shard

Six climbers from Greenpeace climbed to the top of the Shard, the tallest building in Western Europe, in protest against Shell's proposals to drill in the Arctic . The ascent took nearly 16 hours, and at the summit they unfurled a ?Save the Arctic' flag. All six were arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass.

Modern culture is an advocate of speed. From urban planning and transport systems, to the food industry and beyond, ?fast living' cuts deep and affects almost every aspect of life.

In terms of distances, things today are more spread out yet are more interconnected than in the past. This interconnectedness has had the effect of shrinking even the largest of distances and is ably assisted by digital communications technology and rapid transit systems. Airports and metro transport links are being extended or built, huge concrete flyovers cut through neighbourhoods and separate communities from one another and employment is being centralised in out of town business parks or city centre office blocks. Speed of communications and transport narrows the distances.

Encouraging further urban sprawl is of course highly profitable for the real estate, construction, automobile and various other industries (1). It is not that we need this type of urban planning and development, but powerful economic interests and their influence in/over governments dictate it's the type we get.

Speed and high-energy living have become an essential fact of life. In the process, our communities have become disjointed and dispersed. We have sacrificed intimacy, friendship and neighbourliness for a more impersonal way of accelerated living. And the process continues as rural communities are uprooted and hundreds of millions are forced into cities of ever-increasing sizes to indulge in the fast life.   

In the virtual world, friends possibly half the world away are made and ?defriended' at the click of an icon. Likes and dislikes are but passing fads. Meaningful social activism has been trivialised and reduced to the almost meaningless clicking of an online petition. It's more convenient and quicker than taking to the street. After the near destruction of working class movements in many countries, this is what ?protest' has too often become.

In the ?real' world, where ?clicking' just doesn't cut it, how to physically move from A to B as quickly as possible dominates the modern mindset - how to get to work, the airport, to your kids' schools, the hospital or the shopping mall, which are increasingly further away from home. Many now appear to spend half their lives in transit in order to do what was once achievable by foot or by bicycle.  

It's all become a case of how to eat fast, live fast, consume fast, text message fast, Facebook fast and purchase fast. Speed is of the essence. And it seems that the faster we live, the greater our appetites have become. The mantra seems to be faster, quicker, better, more. In a quick-paced, use-and-throw world, speed is addictive.

But there is a heavy price to pay. We are using up the world's resources at an ever greater pace: the materials to make the cell phone or flat screen TVs; the water to irrigate the massive amounts of grain and land required to feed the animals that end up on the dinner plate as the world increasingly turns towards diets that are more meat based; the oil that fuels the transport to get from here to there, to ship the food over huge distances, to fuel the type of petrochemical agriculture we have come to rely on, or the minerals which form a constituent part of the endless stream of consumer products on the shelves. Greed and the grab for resources not only fuels conflict, structural violence imposed on nations via Wall Street backed economic policies and death and war, but high energy, accelerated living takes a heavy toll on the environment and, if we are honest, on ourselves, in terms of our health and our relationships.

If the type of high energy living outlined above continues, we are heading for a crunching slowdown much sooner than we think. It will be catastrophic as current conflicts intensify and new ones emerge over diminishing resources, whether water, oil, minerals, fertile land or food.

The term ?slow living' was popularized when Carlo Petrini protested against the opening of a  McDonald's  restaurant in  Piazza di Spagna in Rome  in 1986. This reaction against fast food sparked the creation of the  Slow Food movement. Over time, this developed into other areas, such as  Cittaslow (Slow Cities) ,  Slow Living , Slow Travel, and  Slow Design .

What was Carlo Petrini actually originally arguing against? Fast food is food that is grown quickly, eaten quickly and prepared quickly. It is convenience food of dubious nutritional quality that fits in with the belief that the ?good life' equates with fast living. It is food that tends to rely on petrochemical pesticides, fertilizers and transport across huge distances. Food that is chemically processed and which relies on hormones, steroids and other similar inputs in order to ?speed things up' in terms of crop or animal growth and delivery to plates that may be half a world away from where it is produced by agricultural workers who themselves are undernourished or malnourished (2). It is nature speeded up, but also nature that has been contaminated and distorted and pressed into the service of big oil and agribusiness interests.

On the other hand, slow food tends to imply food that is grown or produced locally and with minimal bio-chemical inputs. It tends to rest on the sourcing of local foods and centuries' old traditions and ideally sold by neighbourhood farms and stores, not by giant monopolistic retailers that are integral to the fast food industry. Slow food also implies more nourishing and healthy food and agriculture that places less strain on water resources and soil to produce better yields (3) and which does not pollute either body or environment as a result of chemical residues (4) or uproot communities or destroy biodiversity (5).

Slow food is associated with lower energy inputs. It is less reliant on oil-based factory-processed fertilizers/pesticides and oil-based transportation across lengthy distances, not least because it is organically produced and locally sourced. In their ultimate forms, slow food and living slow can arguably best be achieved via decentralization and through communities that are more self-sustaining in terms of food production/consumption as well as in terms of other activities, including localized energy production via renewables or industrial outputs such as garment making or eco-friendly house building. In this respect, slow living extends to remaking the communities and relearning the crafts and artisan skills we have often lost or had stolen from us.

Ultimately, urban planning and the ?local' are key to living slow. No need for the automobile if work, school or healthcare facilities are close by. Less need for ugly flyovers or six lane highways that rip up communities in their path. Getting from A to B would not require a race against the clock on the highway that cuts through a series of localities that are never to be visited, never to be regarded as anything but an inconvenience to be passed through en route to big-mac nirvana, multiplex overload or shopping mall hedonism.

Instead, how about a leisurely, even enjoyable walk or cycle ride through an environment free from traffic pollution or noise, where the pedestrian is not regarded as an obstacle to be honked at with horn, where the cyclist is not a damned inconvenience to be driven off the road or where ?neighbourhood' has been stripped of its intimacy, of its local ?mom and pop' stores, of its local theatres?

Having jettisoned the slow life for a life of fast living, we are now encouraged to seek out the slow life, not least for example through tourism. The trouble is that with more and more people seeking out the slow life for two weeks of respite, destination slow suddenly became a complete mess. Instead of genteel locals, pristine forests and refreshing air, what you experience is sprawling hotel complexes, endless buses and taxis clogging up the place along with thousands of other tourists.

And the locals ? they abandoned the slow life once mass tourism arrived and jumped on the bandwagon of fastness to rent out their rooms at inflated prices, to open restaurants serving fast food that caters to fast tourism. The slow mindset suddenly became abandoned in the quest to make a fast buck from the tourists, and before you knew it, six lane highways arrived, water was gobbled up by tourist complexes and urban sprawl sprawled even further across the once pristine hillsides or beaches.

But that's what fast living or, to be precise, the system that creates it does. It corrupts and destroys most things that get in its way. It recasts everything in its own image. Even ?slowness' has become a bogus, debased commodity sold to the fast living, fast consuming masses.   

What can we do on a practical level that does not result in the debasement of the slow life? Is living slow nothing more than the dreamers mandate for taking us all back a century or two?

For some advocates of slow living, it is about trying to live better in a fast world, perhaps making space to enjoy ?quality time'. For others, however, it comprises a wide ranging cultural and economic revolution that challenges many of the notions that underpin current consumption patterns and ?globalization'.

Loosely defined, slow living is nothing new. From Buddha to the social philosopher Ivan Illich in the 1960s and 70s, the philosophy has always been around in different guises and has been accorded many labels. Whether it is anti-globalization, environmentalism, post-modernism, the organic movement, ?green' energy, localization or decentralization, these concepts and the movements that sprang up around them have embraced some notion of slowness in one form or another.

In India , the Navdanya organization is wholeheartedly against the destruction of biodiversity and traditional farming practices and communities and presents a radical critique of consumerism, petro-chemical farming and Western agribusiness (6). The views of Vandana Shiva, Navdanya's founder, are well documented. Shiva advocates a radical shift of course from the one the world (and India ) is currently on. Navdanya has even opened a Slow Food Café in Delhi .   

On a general level, again taken loosely, slow living might involve improving the quality of life by merely slowing down the pace of living. In urban planning, for example, it may mean pedestrianising urban spaces and restricting motorized traffic, especially car use. In many European cities cycling is encouraged by offering the public the free use of bicycles. Visit any Dutch city to see that cycling is a predominant mode of transport, which certainly makes a positive contribution to the easy going ambiance.

In the UK, in part as a response to traffic congestion and the negative impacts of motorized transport on communities, a movement emerged in the early nineties to ?reclaim the streets', to hand them back to local residents who felt a need to claim ownership of their communities and public spaces, which had essentially been hijacked by commuters or large corporations.   

Living slow may entail slowing down in order to develop some kind of spiritual connection with one's inner self. It might also involve opting for more environmentally friendly products while shopping, living in more eco-sensitive housing, developing small cottage industries or just generally leading a ?greener' lifestyle as a consumer.

But it's no good adopting a piecemeal, watered-down approach. The root of the problem needs to be addressed. The slow life, whether slow food or slow urban environments, is impossible if we fail to realize that d ecisions about urban planning, economic activity, investment, products and services, etc, are made through the capture of governments, regulatory agencies and courts by corporations adamant on expanding and perpetuating their dominance (8,9).

In order to achieve any semblance of genuine, lasting change towards a better, slower world, we must eradicate the material conditions that produce and perpetuate class-based exploitation and divisions on an increasingly global level. These conditions stem from patterns of capital ownership and the consequent flow of wealth from bottom to top that occurs by various means of ?accumulation by dispossession' (corruption, tax evasion/avoidance, bail outs, ?austerity',  ?free trade' agreements, corporate taxpayer subsidies, capital market liberalization, etc).

What we need is proper democracy achieved through, for example, common ownership of banks and key industries and a commitment to ?green' policies and renewable energy. This entails challenging the oligarchs and their corporations that have colonized almost every aspect of modern living, from healthcare, urban planning, food and agriculture to education and development, in order to effect change that is beneficial to their interests and thereby enslaving us all in the process.

Take action and be informed:

http://corporateeurope.org/get-involved

http://www.navdanya.org/campaigns

Colin Todhunter : Originally from the northwest of England, Colin Todhunter has spent many years in India. He has written extensively for the Deccan Herald (the Bangalore-based broadsheet), New Indian Express and Morning Star (Britain). His articles have also appeared in various other newspapers, journals and books. His East by Northwest website is at: http://colintodhunter.blogspot.com

Notes

1) Vidyadhar Date, 13 December, 2013 , Politicians And Bureaucrats Need To Learn Basics About Urban Transport , Countercurrents: http://www.countercurrents.org/date141213.htm

2) Vandana Shiva, 28 August, 2012 , Our Hunger Games, Common Dreams : https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/28-1

3) Arun Shrivastava, 24 March, 2012, India: Genetically Modified Seeds, Agricultural Productivity and Political Fraud, Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/india-genetically-modified-seeds-agricultural-productivity-and-political-fraud/5328227

4) Gautam Dheer, 3 Febrary, 2013, Punjab: Transformation of a food bowl into a cancer epicenter, Deccan Herald: http://www.deccanherald.com/content/309654/punjab-transformation-food-bowl-cancer.html

5) Krishan Kir Chaudhary, July, 2012, Seed Sector in India, Ki Kisan Awaaz: http://www.kisankiawaaz.org/magazine_data/magazine_data_pdf/JULY_2012.pdf

6) Navdanya, Food Sovereignty , Navdanya.com: http://www.navdanya.org/earth-democracy/food-sovereignty

7) Corporate Europe Observatory, 23 October, 2013, Unhappy Meal: The European Food Safety Agency's independence problem, CEO: http://corporateeurope.org/efsa/2013/10/unhappy-meal-european-food-safety-authoritys-independence-problem

8) Corporate Europe Observatory, 17 December, 2013, Civil society groups say no to investor-state dispute settlement in EU-US trade deal, CEO: http://corporateeurope.org/trade/2013/12/civil-society-groups-say-no-investor-state-dispute-settlement-eu-us-trade-deal

Introduction

Lack of sensitivity of teachers towards the needs and classroom dealing of the young children in school is a serious problem. The parents are worried about their child's performance, low self-esteem and losing interest in going to school. It is a fact that the teachers' behavior towards all children is not same and they are bias in dealing with them. This affects the socio-emotional development of the child. The personal relationship a student has with a teacher plays a major role in making a child. A positive remark, an insensitive one, a revengeful one - all have an impact on a child. There have been children that have risen to great heights because of positive encouragement from a teacher, and there have been those that have gone into acute depression because of victimization.

Theories of best practice and current research findings support the need for early childhood educators to be actively involved and sensitive when interacting with young children. A school is meant to be a place where learning has to be holistic, where fairness, justice and values are to be emphasized in action. Parents and teachers are often concerned about children who are aggressive or have challenging behaviors in school settings. Children identified as inhibited or "slow-to-warm-up" on the other end of the spectrum have the temperament characteristics of withdrawal, high sensitivity, and low intensity. They are quiet and subdued in social situations, offer fewer spontaneous comments, smile less, and interact less with peers. Teachers may perceive them as anxious, frightened, or aloof. These children are often overlooked. It is very important for the teachers to create a friendly relationship with the children to motivate them and bring out their creativity. The role of a teacher is like a bridge between the child and the parent to make the parents realize the child's innate talents and behavior and guide the parents to work with the child. But this is a challenge in schools today as few teachers are unable to understand the importance of child's needs and their role in overall development of the child.

Role of Schools for young children

The schools for tiny toddlers have to take care of the following:

•  To create a   stimulating environment   that encourages continuous & learning, reflection and self assessment; one that engages children in a network of emotionally safe relationships and experiences.   

•  To devise and implement programmes that is based on the   latest scientific theories of learning & child development.

•  To promote the art of   story-telling   in both traditional and modern formats to enhance expression through varied forms & languages.  

•  Consider Parents as Partners in Education   and with their support unleash a child's real potential.

•  To provide   holistic education   that allows children to develop and grow ? physically, mentally, emotionally & spiritually.

•  To have an attractive infrastructure and facilities for the student and the staff like; a library for students and staff

•  To have a computer lab for teachers with internet facility and the appropriate software installed.

•  To have a sandpit area and play ground for children to play.

•  To have a good ambience.

Last Word

It is important for the school authorities to help the teachers to understand the child psychology and the consequences of handling children insensitively. The school management can time and again conduct the workshop and the training programs for the teachers to help them understand children's needs. It is observed that schools for young children do not take care of recruiting well qualified teachers i.e. a teacher with a degree of Early Childhood Care Education (ECCE). They tend to recruit the available teachers in the market and then train them to the school needs. Thus, many a time the newly recruited inexperienced teachers fail to understand child psychology, handle the child's emotional needs, and are not successful in making school a happy place and learning a joyful experience for them. Such a grave problem must be taken care of or else it can affect the reputation of the schools and make parents unhappy with the school management and the teachers which may result into student withdrawal from the school.

(Swaleha Sindhi is Assistant Professor at the M.S.University of Baroda, her area of interest is Educational Management, Quality Assurance in Education and Secondary Education. She can be mailed at;ms.swalehasindhi@rediffmail.com)

Dr. Brulle. Credit: CASBS

Not only well-known conservative foundations the largest and most consistent funders behind the climate denial campaign but the majority of donations are "dark money," or concealed funding. A new study by Drexel University 's environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle, PhD unravels the systematic efforts to discredit climate science.

The first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort found:

The conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate crisis.

The study findings said:

The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change. Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from the US Congress to cut GHG emissions that are warming the planet.

The study report has been published on December 20, 2013 in Climatic Change .

Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science in Drexel's College of Arts and Sciences, conducted the study during a fellowship at Stanford University 's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Key findings of the study include:

A Phys.org report [1] on the study findings said:

The study exposes the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the powerful climate change countermovement.

The study marks the first peer-reviewed, comprehensive analysis ever conducted of the sources of funding that maintain the denial effort.

Through an analysis of the financial structure of the organizations that constitute the core of the countermovement and their sources of monetary support, Brulle found that, while the largest and most consistent funders behind the countermovement are a number of well-known conservative foundations, the majority of donations are "dark money," or concealed funding.

The climate change countermovement is a well-funded and organized effort to undermine public faith in climate science and block action by the US government to regulate emissions. This countermovement involves a large number of organizations, including conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations and conservative foundations, with strong links to sympathetic media outlets and conservative politicians.

The report cited Brulle. "The climate change countermovement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act on the issue of global warming. Like a play on Broadway, the countermovement has stars in the spotlight ? often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians ? but behind the stars is an organizational structure of directors, script writers and producers, in the form of conservative foundations. If you want to understand what's driving this movement, you have to look at what's going on behind the scenes."

To uncover how the countermovement was built and maintained, Brulle developed a listing of 118 important climate denial organizations in the US .

He then coded data on philanthropic funding for each organization, combining information from the Foundation Center with financial data submitted by organizations to the Internal Revenue Service. The final sample for analysis consisted of 140 foundations making 5,299 grants totaling $558 million to 91 organizations from 2003 to 2010.

"The real issue here is one of democracy. Without a free flow of accurate information, democratic politics and government accountability become impossible," said Brulle. "Money amplifies certain voices above others and, in effect, gives them a megaphone in the public square. Powerful funders are supporting the campaign to deny scientific findings about global warming and raise public doubts about the roots and remedies of this massive global threat. At the very least, American voters deserve to know who is behind these efforts."

A report by Suzanne Goldenberg said [2]:

?I call it the climate-change counter movement,? said Brulle. ?It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.?

Brulle's study offers the most definitive exposure to date of the political and financial forces blocking American action on climate change.

It was not always possible to separate funds designated strictly for climate-change work from overall budgets, Brulle said. ?Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizations, not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.?

Some of the think tanks on Brulle's list ? such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) ? said they had no institutional position on climate change and did not control the output of their scholars. 

Brulle acknowledged that he was unable to uncover the full extent of funding sources to the effort to oppose action on climate change. About three-quarters of the funds were routed through trusts or other mechanisms that assure anonymity to donors ? a trend Brulle described as disturbing and a threat to democracy.

?This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power,? he said. ?They have their profits and they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hear people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. It ends up that people without economic power don't have the same size voice as the people who have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy.

?That is the bottom line here. These are unaccountable organizations deciding what our politics should be. They put their thumbs on the scale ? It is more one dollar one vote than one person one vote.?

The vast majority of the 91 groups on Brulle's list ? 79% ? was registered as charitable organizations and enjoyed considerable tax breaks. Those 91 groups included trade organizations, think tanks and campaign groups. The groups collectively received more than $7bn over the eight years of Brulle's study ? or about $900m a year from 2003 to 2010. Conservative think tanks and advocacy groups occupied the core of that effort.

The funding was dispersed to top-tier conservative think tanks in Washington , such as the AEI and Heritage Foundation, which focus on a range of issues, as well as more obscure organizations such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the John Locke Foundation.

Funding also went to groups that took on climate change denial as a core mission ? such as the Heartland Institute, which held regular conclaves dedicated to undermining the United Nations climate panel's reports, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which tried and failed to prosecute a climate scientist, Michael Mann, for academic fraud.

AEI was by far the top recipient of such funds, receiving 16% of total funding over the eight years, or $86.7m. Heartland Institute, in contrast, received just 3% of the total, $16.7m. There was also generous support to Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group affiliated with the conservative Koch billionaires, which received $22.7m.

The Guardian report said:

An investigation by the Guardian last February found that the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund had distributed nearly $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups from 2002-2010. The Donors group has now displaced such previous prominent supporters of the climate denial movement as the Koch-affiliated foundations and corporations like Exxon Mobil, Brulle said.

A number of the groups on Brulle's list ? both as funders and recipients ? refused to comment on his findings or disputed his contention that they were part of a movement to block action on climate change.

Whitney Ball, the president of the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, said the organisation had no say in deciding which projects would receive funding. However, Ball told the Guardian last February that Donors offered funders the assurance their money would never go to Greenpeace. ?It won't be going to liberals,? she said at that time.

Recipients of the funds also disputed the assertion they were part of a larger effort to undermine climate science or block action on climate change.

?We do believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that man-made emissions will lead to some warming,? said David Kreutzer, an energy and climate-change fellow at the Heritage Foundation. ?We are opposed to mandatory greenhouse gas emissions cuts.?

He said many conservatives saw a carbon tax, cap-and-trade and other climate policies as a government takeover by stealth.

?What we are not interested in doing is a huge shift of power to the government under the guise of preventing some climate problem,? he said.

The Hoover Institution, which received about $45m, claimed to produce no work on climate change ? while displaying on its website an article by a Hoover research fellow on an August 2013 Hoover poll on economic, energy and environmental issues.

Source:

1. Phys.org, Science X network, http://phys.org/news/2013-12-koch-brothers-reveals-funders-climate.html

[2] US environment correspondent, theguardian.com, ?Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change?, Dec 20, 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/20/conservative-groups-1bn-against-climate-change

Today there is a great deal of interest in the Montessori Method of learning. Contemporary research and brain scans confirm that many things that Maria Montessori only theorized are in fact true. Montessori education has therefore a deep relevance to society today. If we dream of a harmonious world, every one living in peace and harmony and in a natural environment, we must expend energy on supporting the development of young children through Montessori Method of learning.

Rukmini Ramachandran is a trailblazer in the field of Montessori Method of education in India. She holds an AMI Montessori Elementary diploma having completed her training at the Maria Montessori Institute in London. She further did some course on Montessori training at Toronto to return home and begin the Montessori teacher training in Chennai. She is the Founder Trustee of the Navadisha Montessori Foundation and is currently the Director of Training of the AMI Montessori Teacher Training Course run by the organization. She exclusively spoke to SYED ALI MUJTABA about Montessori Method of learning which she practice and preach. Here is an excerpt of her interview.

Can you give a brief description about Montessori Method of education?

Montessori education for many of us who are practitioner is a way of life, a life in which the child is seen as the most important. Maria Montessori in her writings stated that it was not a method but that it was a respectful approach to the development of a child. Montessori education approaches the child not as a helpless being, but as a powerful creator of the adult. It meets the needs of the child at various stages of development and supports development in appropriate ways. Many educationists have talked of respect for the child. A very special aspect of Montessori education is the freedom of choice, which supports the growth of self discipline and promotes inner motivation. The concept of a prepared environment, specially prepared to meet the needs of the child is an amazingly original idea, a unique contribution by Maria Montessori.

How Montessori Method education is different?

The Montessori approach to education is psychological approach and it is aligned to principles of development set out by great philosophers of all time. It entails respect for the child, a natural environment that is conducive to learning, an education that is sensitive to beauty and social justice, and a teacher who does not dominate.

Do you think the children of Montessori education can compete with their peer in other schools?

It is difficult to generalize ‘other’ schools to mean schools not following Montessori principles. There are too many types of ‘other’ schools and it may be like comparing apples and oranges. The aim of Montessori education is not to compete with peers. Children between 2 ½ to 6 years are to be found in the same class. The children from the time they start school return to the same class for three years. The children form a small community and share all that they know with one another. The value of the Montessori class is to put aside one’s own need to go to the help of another. The aim is to lay the foundation of strength of character. The older child learns to guide the younger and develop patience and the younger learns by watching and admiring the older children. The progress of the children is rapid. They learn making no effort just by being a part of the rich environment. Their development helps them to establish the base of their personalities.

Does a Child take lot of time in picking up the basics threads of education in Montessori system of learning?

Maria Montessori defined education as aid to life. The Montessori approach to education focus is on deepening the understanding of the child through personal experience. Memory is never approached directly. The interest of the child is kindled and the child chooses freely to work at his own development. The child at this stage has the power of effortless absorption. For example a child who grows up around a particular language makes it a part of the personality. There is no fear of forgetting that which has been learnt. The aim of education is not to fill an empty cup but to have faith in the child who has vast potential, and to ensure the conditions in his environment which allows him to absorb everything he needs.

Is it true in Montessori Method of learning children skip the joy of singing and other such activities?

Music is an integral part of a Montessori environment. It is seen as every child’s inheritance. The Montessori approach to music is holistic. Children are not only encouraged to sing songs but receive rich exposure to music in every way so that they can build a relationship with it. Music helps children become sensitive to beauty. It is considered as an aspect of language development. Between 3 and 6 years is the age of effortless learning. This is the time for maximum exposure. The children listen to musical instruments and classical vocal music relevant to their culture. Sometimes Montessori teachers invite expert musicians to share their art with the children. Montessori teachers share songs and poems with children which are rooted in reality, songs relevant to their lives. They also introduce folk rhythms and lyrics.

Does fine arts have special place in the Montessori Method of learning?

In the Montessori environment art is about giving the children the opportunity to express themselves Montessori environment has a great deal of emphasis on the arts. These are however not done as part of a set curriculum. Art in the Montessori environment is imbedded in all aspects of the work of the children. It is not teacher directed. The children are never told what to draw. Art is an expression of the innermost soul. The children are not expected to work with the same things at the same time. I believe that this actually kills creativity rather than nurturing it. With a little guidance, the children work making independent choices and they direct their own learning. Painting, cutting, music and dance are part of the ethos. The children are introduced to practical techniques – how to hold a brush, how to use a pair of scissors, how to apply glue. The children can choose such activities independently and work with them as long as they want. When they have completed something to their satisfaction they put away all the implements as they know where those things are stored.

How did you develop interest in Children's education?

I was offered a job by the Kalki group to edit the new English magazine Gokulam. I was excited about working for children’s magazine. However the job left me with many questions. What do children read? Why do they read? What interests’ children? How can we meet the needs of children? A family friend who was the publisher of Montessori books in India suggested me to do a Montessori course to find answer to my questions. My life changed after doing the course in Mumbai under the guidance of Ms. Zarin Malva, the Director of the Training programme. I felt I had begun to understand myself and others in a much better way. The idea that caught my attention is the idea that interest of the child is the centre of education. I came back and decided to start a school. As the school grew we needed teachers for the school and so eventually 14 years later we started a Teachers training centre.

Can you tell me some basic things about Navadisha Foundation?

Navadisha Montessori Foundation began the activities of teacher training in 2004. The training is affiliated to the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI). AMI is the apex body of Montessori pedagogy and it was established in 1929 by Dr. Montessori to continue her work in its essence and fullness. Navadisha is one of two AMI Montessori courses run in India, (the other one is in Mumbai) and one of 30 or so worldwide. Navadisha has recently run two satellite courses in a modular format in Thrissur, Kerala and in Bangalore, Karnataka. An AMI course is a one year training programme. Courses are offered for two age levels at Navadisha – 3-6 years and 6-12 years. Diplomas for successful candidates are awarded by AMI. The training centre attracts students of all ages, from different corners of India and abroad, and from all walks of life. The students are usually within the 9 months are drawn together in the very intensive programme forming a tightly knit and cohesive community. The link between them is an interest in children and the desire to serve the community through the child.

Can you tell me some basic things about Navadisha School?

Navadisha Montessori School was established in 1997. The aim was to find a new direction in education and to redefine the goals of education. In Navadisha Montessori school the children are helped to be independent from the start. The school tries to create an environment of where teachers, non-teaching staff and children come together to form a caring community. Collaboration and caring for the environment are values that are practiced in all school activities. The school has 3 Montessori environments for children from 3-6 years and from 6-12 years. Stds VI to X follow the ICSE curriculum.

This interview has to be summed up with thoughts from Maria Montessori who says; Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words but by experiences in the environment. The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent of teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens. While dealing with a child there is greater need for observing than of probing. It is the child who makes the man, and no man exists who was not made by the child he once was.

Syed Ali Mujtaba is a journalist based in Chennai. He can be contacted at syedalimujtaba@yahoo.com

George W. Bush
George W. Bush Presidential Center
PO Box 560887
Dallas, Texas, 57356

Dear Mr. Bush:

A few days ago I received a personalized letter from your Presidential Center which included a solicitation card for donations that actually provided words for my reply. They included “I’m honored to help tell the story of the Bush Presidency” and “I’m thrilled that the Bush Institute is advancing timeless principles and practical solutions to the challenges facing our world.” (Below were categories of “tax-deductible contributions” starting with $25 and going upward.)

Did you mean the “timeless principles” that drove you and Mr. Cheney to invade the country of Iraq which, contrary to your fabrications, deceptions and cover-ups, never threatened the United States? Nor could Iraq [under its dictator and his dilapidated military] threaten its far more powerful neighbors, even if the Iraqi regime wanted to do so.

Today, Iraq remains a country (roughly the size and population of Texas) you destroyed, a country where over a million Iraqis, including many children and infants (remember Fallujah?) lost their lives, millions more were sickened or injured, and millions more were forced to become refugees, including most of the Iraqi Christians. Iraq is a country rife with sectarian strife that your prolonged invasion provoked into what is now open warfare. Iraq is a country where al-Qaeda is spreading with explosions taking 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60 lives per day. Just this week, it was reported that the U.S. has sent Hellfire air-to-ground missiles to Iraq’s air force to be used against encampments of “the country’s branch of al-Qaeda.” There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before your invasion. Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were mortal enemies.

The Bush/Cheney sociocide of Iraq, together with the loss of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers’ lives, countless injuries and illnesses, registers, with the passage of time, no recognition by you that you did anything wrong nor have you accepted responsibility for the illegality of your military actions without a Congressional declaration of war. You even turned your back on Iraqis who worked with U.S. military occupation forces as drivers, translators etc. at great risk to themselves and their families and were desperately requesting visas to the U.S., often with the backing of U.S. military personnel. Your administration allowed fewer Iraqis into the U.S. than did Sweden in that same period and far, far fewer than Vietnamese refugees coming to the U.S. during the nineteen seventies.

When you were a candidate, I called you a corporation running for the Presidency masquerading as a human being. In time you turned a metaphor into a reality. As a corporation, you express no remorse, no shame, no compassion and a resistance to admit anything other than that you have done nothing wrong.

Day after day Iraqis, including children, continue to die or suffer terribly. When the paraplegic, U.S. army veteran, Tomas Young, wrote you last year seeking some kind of recognition that many things went horribly criminal for many American soldiers and Iraqis, you did not deign to reply, as you did not deign to reply to Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son, Casey, in Iraq. As you said, “the interesting thing about being the president” is that you “don’t feel like [you] owe anybody an explanation.” As a former President, nothing has changed as you make very lucrative speeches before business groups and, remarkably, ask Americans for money to support your “continued work in public service.”

Pollsters have said that they believe a majority of Iraqis would say that life today is worse for them than under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. They would also say George W. Bush left Iraq worse off than when he entered it, despite the U.S. led sanctions prior to 2003 that took so many lives of Iraqi children and damaged the health of so many civilian families.

Your national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, said publically in 2012 that while “the arc of history” may well turn out better for post-invasion Iraq than the present day violent chaos, she did “take personal responsibility” for the casualties and the wreckage. Do you?

Can you, at the very least, publically urge the federal government to admit more civilian Iraqis, who served in the U.S. military occupation, to this country to escape the retaliation that has been visited on their similarly-situated colleagues? Isn’t that the minimum you can do to very slightly lessen the multiple, massive blowbacks that your reckless military policies have caused? It was your own anti-terrorism White House adviser, Richard Clarke, who wrote in his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, soon after leaving his post, that the U.S. played right into Osama bin Laden’s hands by invading Iraq.

Are you privately pondering what your invasion of Iraq did to the Iraqis and American military families, the economy and to the spread of al-Qaeda attacks in numerous countries?

Sincerely yours,

Ralph Nader

P.S. I am enclosing as a contribution in kind to your presidential center library the book Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions by Clyde Prestowitz (2003) whom I’m sure you know. Note the positive remark on the back cover by General Wesley Clark.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and "Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us" (a novel).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

While the news about climate change seems to get worse every day, the rapidly improving technology, declining costs, and increasing accessibility of clean energy is the true bright spot in the march toward a zero-carbon future. 2013 had more clean energy milestones than we could fit on one page, but here are thirteen of the key breakthroughs that happened this year.

1. Using salt to keep producing solar power even when the sun goes down. Helped along by the Department of Energy’s loan program, Solana’s massive 280 megawatt (MW) solar plant came online in Arizona this October, with one unique distinction: the plant will use a ‘salt battery’ that will allow it to keep generating electricity even when the sun isn’t shining. Not only is this a first for the United States in terms of thermal energy storage, the Solana plant is also the largest in the world to use to use parabolic trough mirrors to concentrate solar energy.

2. Electric vehicle batteries that can also power buildings. Nissan’s groundbreaking ‘Vehicle-To-Building‘ technology will enable companies to regulate their electricity needs by tapping into EVs plugged into their garages during times of peak demand. Then, when demand is low, electricity flows back to the vehicles, ensuring they’re charged for the drive home. With Nissan’s system, up to six electric vehicles can be plugged into a building at one time. As more forms renewable energy is added to the grid, storage innovations like this will help them all work together to provide reliable power.

3. The next generation of wind turbines is a gamechanger. May of 2013 brought the arrival of GE’s Brilliant line of wind turbines, which bring two technologies within the turbines to address storage and intermittency concerns. An “industrial internet” communicates with grid operators, to predict wind availability and power needs, and to optimally position the turbine. Grid-scale batteries built into the turbines store power when the wind is blowing but the electricity isn’t needed — then feed it into the grid as demand comes along, smoothing out fluctuations in electricity supply. It’s a more efficient solution to demand peaks than fossil fuel plants, making it attractive even from a purely business aspect. Fifty-nine of the turbines are headed for Michigan, and two more will arrive in Texas.

4. Solar electricity hits grid parity with coal. A single solar photovoltaic (PV) cell cost $76.67 per watt back in 1977, then fell off a cliff. Bloomberg Energy Finance forecast the price would reach $0.74 per watt in 2013 and as of the first quarter of this year, they were actually selling for $0.64 per watt. That cuts down on solar’s installation costs — and since the sunlight is free, lower installation costs mean lower electricity prices. And in 2013, they hit grid parity with coal: in February, a southwestern utility, agreed to purchase electricity from a New Mexico solar project for less than the going rate for a new coal plant. Unsubsidized solar power reached grid parity in countries such as Italy and India. And solar installations have boomed worldwide and here in America, as the lower module costs have drivendown installation prices.

5. Advancing renewable energy from ocean waves. With the nation’s first commercial, grid-connected underwater tidal turbine successfully generating renewable energy off the coast of Maine for a year, the Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC) has its sights set on big growth. The project has invested more than $21 million into the Maine economy and an environmental assessment in March found no detrimental impact on the marine environment. Withhelp from the Department of Energy, the project is set to deploy two more devices in 2014. In November, ORPC waschosen to manage a wave-energy conversion project in remote Yakutat, Alaska. And a Japanese delegation visited the project this year as the country seeks to produce 30 percent of its total power offshore by 2030.

6. Harnessing ocean waves to produce fresh water. This year saw the announcement of Carnegie Wave Energy’s upcoming desalination plant near Perth, Australia. It will use the company’s underwater buoy technology to harness ocean wave force to pressurize the water, cutting out the fossil-fuel-powered electric pumps that usually force water through the membrane in the desalination process. The resulting system — “a world first” — will be carbon-free, and efficient in terms of both energy and cost. Plan details were completed in October, the manufacturing contract was awarded in November, and when it’s done, the plant will supply 55 billion litters of fresh drinking water per year.

7. Ultra-thin solar cells that break efficiency records. Conversion efficiency is the amount of light hitting the solar cell that’s actually changed into electricity, and it’s typically 18.7 percent and 24 percent. But Alta Devices, a Silicon Valley solar manufacturer, set a new record of 30.8 percent conversion efficiency this year. Its method is more expensive, but the result is a durable and extremely thin solar cell that can generate a lot of electricity from a small surface area. That makes Alta’s cells perfect for small and portable electronic devices like smartphones and tablets, and the company is in discussions to apply them to mobile phones, smoke detectors, door alarms, computer watches, remote controls, and more.

8. Batteries that are safer, lighter, and store more power. Abundant and cost-effective storage technology will be crucial for a clean energy economy — no where more so than with electric cars. But right now batteries don’t always hold enough charge to power automobiles for extended periods, and they add significantly to bulk and cost. But at the start of 2013, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory successfully demonstrated a new lithium-ion battery technology that can store far more power in a much smaller size, and that’s safer and less prone to shorts. They used nanotechnology to create an electrolyte that’s solid, ultra-thin, and porous, and they also combined the approach with lithium-sulfur battery technology, which could further enhance cost-effectiveness.

9. New age offshore wind turbines that float. Offshore areas are prime real estate for wind farms, but standard turbines require lots of construction and are limited to waters 60 meters deep or less. But Statoil, the Norwegian-based oil and gas company, began work this year on a hub of floating wind turbines off the coast of Scotland. The turbines merely require a few cables to keep them anchored, and can be placed in water up to 700 meters. That could vastly expand the amount of economically practical offshore wind power. The hub off Scotland will be the largest floating wind farm in the world — and two floating turbines are planned off the coast of Fukushima, Japan, along with the world’s first floating electrical substation.

10. Cutting electricity bills with direct current power. Alternating current (AC), rather than direct current (DC) is the dominant standard for electricity use. But DC current has its own advantages: its cheap, efficient, works better with solar panels and wind turbines, and doesn’t require adaptors that waste energy as heat. Facebook, JPMorgan, Sprint, Boeing, and Bank of America have all built datacenters that rely on DC power, since DC-powered datacenters are 20 percent more efficient, cost 30 percent less, and require 25 to 40 percent less floorspace. On the residential level, new USB technology will soon be able to deliver100 watts of power, spreading DC power to ever more low voltage personal electronics, and saving homesinefficiency costs in their electricity bill.

11. Commercial production of clean energy from plant waste is finally here. Ethanol derived from corn, once held up as a climate-friendly alternative to gasoline, is under increasing fire. Many experts believe it drives up food prices, and studies disagree on whether it actually releases any less carbon dioxide when its full life cycle is accounted for. Cellulosic biofuels, promise to get around those hurdles, and 2013 may be when the industry finally turned the corner. INOES Bio’s cellulosic ethanol plant in Florida and KiOR’s cellulosic plant in Mississippi began commercial production this year. Two more cellulosic plants are headed for Iowa, and yet another’s being constructed in Kansas.The industry says 2014?s proposed cellulosic fuel mandate of 17 million gallons will be easily met.

12. Innovative financing bringing clean energy to more people. In DC, the first ever property-assessed clean energy (PACE) project allows investments in efficiency and renewables to be repaid through a special tax levied on the property, which lowers the risk for owners. Crowdfunding for clean energy projects made major strides bringing decentralized renewable energy to more people — particularly the world’s poor — and Solar Mosaic is pioneering crowdfunding to pool community investments in solar in the United States. California figured out how to allow customers who aren’t property owners or who don’t have a suitable roof for solar — that’s 75 percent of the state — to nonetheless purchase up to 100 percent clean energy for their home or business. Minnesota advanced itscommunity solar gardens program, modeled after Colorado’s successful initiative. And Washington, DC voted to bring in virtual net metering, which allows people to buy a portion of a larger solar or wind project, and then have their portion of the electricity sold or credited back to the grid on their behalf, reducing the bill.

13. Wind power is now competitive with fossil fuels. “We’re now seeing power agreements being signed with wind farms at as low as $25 per megawatt-hour,” Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley’s Head of North American Equity Research for Power & Utilities and Clean Energy, told the Columbia Energy Symposium in late November. Byrd explained that wind’s ongoing variable costs are negligible, which means an owner can bring down the cost of power purchase agreements by spreading the up-front investment over as many units as possible. As a result, larger wind farms in the Midwest are confronting coal plants in the Powder River Basin with “fairly vicious competition.” And even without the production tax credit, wind can still undercut many natural gas plants. A clear sign of its viability, wind power currently meets 25 percent of Iowa’s energy needs and is projected to reach a whopping 50 percent by 2018.

It was Saturday night, and, as usual, Rosa Moreno was getting ready to work the night shift at the factory.

On this night, Feb. 19, 2011, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, a premonition that perhaps she shouldn’t go. But she needed the money. It was the final shift in her six-day workweek, and if she missed a day, the factory would dock her 300 pesos. She couldn’t afford to lose that kind of money. Her family already struggled to survive on the 1,300 pesos (about $100) a week she earned. Unable to shake the bad feeling, she’d already missed her bus, and now she’d have to pay for a taxi. But the thought of losing 300 pesos was worse. She had to go. Rosa kissed her six children goodnight and set out across town.

In the Mexican border city of Reynosa, the hundreds of maquiladoras that produce everything from car parts to flat-screen televisions run day and night—365 days a year—to feed global demand. Rosa worked from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. at a factory called HD Electronics in a sprawling maquiladora park near the international bridge that links Reynosa, an industrial city of 600,000, to Pharr, Texas. Like the 90,000 or more workers in Reynosa, the 38-year-old Rosa depended on these factories for her livelihood. In the 11 years since she moved to the city, she had welded circuitry for Asian and European cell phone companies, assembled tubing for medical IV units to be shipped over the border to the United States, and worked on a production line assembling air conditioners for General Motors.

This was her second month at HD Electronics, a South Korean firm that had moved to Reynosa in 2006 to produce the metal backing for flat-screen televisions made by another South Korean firm, LG Electronics—a $49 billion corporation. LG also has a plant in Reynosa and could scarcely keep up with the North American demand for its plasma and LCD televisions.

At HD Electronics, Rosa operated a 200-ton hydraulic stamping press. Every night, six days a week, she fed the massive machine thin aluminum sheets. The machine ran all day, every day. Each time the press closed it sounded like a giant hammer striking metal: thwack, thwack, thwack. The metal sheets emerged pierced and molded into shape for each model and size of television. At the factory, 20 women, including Rosa, worked the presses to make the pieces for the smaller televisions. Nearby were 10 larger presses, each of which took two men to operate, to make backings for the giant-screen models.

Rosa was glad to have the work, but it was exhausting. Her husband was serving a five-year sentence in prison. She wouldn’t talk about what had put him there. Whatever happened, she was on her own. Thankfully, her two oldest were already grown and married. But she had six children still at home to clothe and feed. She especially worried about her youngest—9-year-old twins Rosita and Lencho. They had scarcely spent time with their father before he’d gone away. And now she was always at work, or tired or stressed about money.

At the plant, the line leader urged the workers to move faster. “You work without stopping because you have to reach a set goal,” Rosa said. “You can’t even go to the bathroom. And your feet start to ache and your back hurts because you’re standing in the same position the whole time.”

Complaining wouldn’t do any good. There was always another worker who would take her place. The modest labor and safety protections that workers had fought for in the 1990s, with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), had been lost after the maquila industry was battered by the automotive crisis that began in 2000 and then the recession of 2008. Multinational corporations competing in the global economy wanted cheap, compliant labor that they could hire and fire at will. The Mexican government and the business community, not wanting to lose an important sector of the economy, did everything they could to abide by industry demands. Rosa had to comply or be replaced.

At 1 a.m., the women in her section were excused for their 30-minute break to eat. Rosa had brought tamales to share. She wasn’t happy about being moved to machine 19 but she kept her thoughts to herself. Another worker had been moving too slowly, so the line leader had moved Rosa to machine 19 to speed up production. “No one liked to work on that machine, because everyone thought it was too difficult,” she said. “But the way it works is that the person who moves the fastest is moved to wherever the material must be produced.”

After the break, Rosa returned to her station. She rolled her gray woolen gloves up to her elbows to prevent cuts from the thin metal sheets she fed into the massive press. After an hour, the line leader came by to ask Rosa how many pieces she had produced. “I said, ‘1,500 pieces,’ and he said, ‘No, you need to go faster because they need to ship these pieces by morning.’” Rosa picked up the pace. “This machine was different from the one I usually use. You had to push the piece in with both hands and make sure it was perfectly centered.” After that, she would press two buttons, one with each hand, to lower the press. “I was very concentrated, really focused on getting the work done,” she said. At approximately 2:30 a.m., Rosa was centering a piece of metal in the machine when she heard something metallic give way.

Rosa’s friend Cira Mesa was working on another machine a few feet away. “I heard a single, high-pitched scream,” she said. “I looked over, and it was Rosa. The machine had fallen on her hands.”

The difficult, often dangerous working conditions that Rosa and at least 1.3 million other Mexican workers endure in the maquiladora industry were supposed to get better. That’s what political leaders on both sides of the border had pledged in 1994 with the passage of the continent-wide trade agreement. NAFTA, it was promised, would drive up workers’ wages, improve working conditions and spur job growth, creating hundreds of thousands of new middle-class citizens on both sides of the border.

The seeds of NAFTA were cultivated in Texas during numerous discussions between Mexico’s young Harvard-trained President Carlos Salinas and President George H.W. Bush. In 1992, at a historic meeting in San Antonio, Salinas, Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney posed for a photo while their top negotiators ceremoniously signed the agreement at the Plaza San Antonio Hotel.

The maquiladora industry was instrumental to NAFTA. Multinational corporations from developed countries like the United States and Canada could import raw materials to be assembled and manufactured at maquiladoras in free-trade zones along Mexico’s northern border. Mexico would provide the corporations with low-wage workers and charge minimal tariffs.

Maquiladoras had been Mexico’s primary economic development strategy since the late 1960s. Under the repressive one-party rule of the Revolutionary Institutional Party, or PRI, the labor unions had been largely coopted to favor the business sector. By the early 1990s, Mexican President Salinas, a member of the PRI, had become an unabashed cheerleader for NAFTA, telling Fortune magazine the agreement would “Create additional jobs and make wages grow. …If we do not create additional jobs in Mexico, Mexicans will merely walk across the border looking for jobs in the north.”

But NAFTA also had its detractors. U.S. labor unions, environmentalists, human-rights advocates and other opponents on both sides of the border predicted the loss of American manufacturing jobs and deteriorating conditions for Mexican workers. Mexico, with its lax pollution regulations and labor enforcement, would become a magnet for multinational corporations looking to cut costs, critics argued. The debate polarized both countries. During a 1992 presidential debate, independent candidate and billionaire Ross Perot struck a chord with many critics when he described U.S. job losses to Mexico under NAFTA as “a giant sucking sound going south.”

In early 1993, newly elected President Bill Clinton, under pressure from labor unions and other critics, pledged to re-open negotiations on NAFTA, promising better labor and environmental protections. Again Texas played a crucial role. A frustrated President Salinas, who had spent three years negotiating the agreement with Bush, hastily requested a meeting with the president-elect, according to Maxwell A. Cameron and Brian Tomlin in their book The Making of NAFTA: How the Deal Was Done.  Not officially president yet, Clinton couldn’t meet with Salinas on Mexican soil. With the help of Texas Gov. Ann Richards, they met in Austin to discuss changes to NAFTA that would include more protections for workers. NAFTA was ratified in 1994.

President Clinton praised the agreement’s benefits for workers. “There will be an even more rapid closing of the gap between our two wage rates,” he said.  “And as the benefits of economic growth are spread in Mexico to working people, what will happen? They’ll have more disposable income to buy more American products, and there will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home.”

Clinton estimated NAFTA would produce 200,000 new jobs in the United States within the first two years. Salinas had similar glowing predictions. There were some positive economic indicators. Foreign direct investment in Mexico surged, and the country’s exports tripled. Meanwhile, Americans found they could buy imported goods more cheaply.

But for workers on both sides of the border, especially those without a college degree, NAFTA was a devastating blow. The great “sucking sound to the south,” as Perot had so bluntly put it, had begun. Between 1994 and 2010, nearly 683,000 U.S. jobs were lost—the majority of them in manufacturing, according to a study on NAFTA by the progressive Economic Policy Institute. Workers from the higher-paid manufacturing sectors in the U.S. were forced to take lower-wage service industry jobs, losing retirement and health-insurance benefits.

In Mexico, the number of foreign-owned maquiladoras doubled, but government policies kept wages from increasing. Meanwhile, cheap U.S.-subsidized corn flooded the Mexican market, putting small farmers out of business and forcing them to leave their towns for larger urban centers in search of work. Mexico’s economy grew at a sluggish annual per capita rate of just 1.6 percent between 1992 and 2007—one of the lowest rates in Latin America, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Very little of the wealth generated by the maquiladoras was invested into Mexican society to alleviate poverty. The global economy favored a few. In 2010 Forbes magazine named its first Mexican citizen, Carlos Slim, as the world’s richest man. Yet 45 percent of the Mexican population lived in poverty, according to government figures.

Like many, Rosa was struggling to put food on the table. Working six days a week she took home 5,200 pesos a month, about $400. To make a little extra money, she also sold cosmetics and face creams. In Reynosa, like other border cities, the cost of living wasn’t cheap. Food in the supermarkets cost as much as it did in the United States. The public elementary school in Rosa’s poor, working-class neighborhood was so overcrowded it divided the school day into two shifts. Her 9-year-old twins Rosita and Lencho waited until the morning shift was over so they could attend school in the afternoon. Rosa and other parents were expected to pay a registration fee, and for books and uniforms. The mortgage on her tiny two-bedroom home wasn’t cheap, either. Every month she paid 2,500 pesos, nearly half her monthly income, for her concrete-block home on a dusty side street.

At the same time, life in Reynosa was becoming more dangerous. In 2006, the government launched a military campaign against drug cartels and violence exploded, especially in working-class neighborhoods like Rosa’s. It wasn’t unusual for cartel gunmen to hijack the buses taking workers to the factories and use them to blockade the roads during gun battles with the military or a rival cartel. Workers were sometimes killed in the crossfire. Working night shifts was especially dangerous because the gunmen were most active at night. Foreign owners and upper-level managers of the maquiladoras curtailed their own travel to the city, holding management meetings across the river in Texas, where many of them lived. The inequality gap now had a new dimension involving personal safety: Upper management stayed on the U.S. side of the border and away from the weekly gun battles, while the workers remained to run the factories—and dodge the bullets.

Working the night shift, Rosa at least felt better that her children were at home asleep while she worked and not on the streets. She knew it was dangerous to leave for work late at night to take a bus across the city. But she always felt safe once she reached the factory.

Jose Olmos was working one of the large stamping presses when he heard the screams. By the time he got to Rosa, “some of the women had fainted,” he said. “But Rosa just stood there silent. I imagine she was in shock. A maintenance man was pressing the buttons, trying to get the hydraulic press to open.”

“It felt like I had plunged my hands into boiling water—they were burning,” Rosa said, her words tumbling out quickly as she relived the accident. “I tried to control myself so that I didn’t panic or get too scared. My biggest fear was that if I lost consciousness, I wouldn’t know where they’d leave me. I thank God. He’s the one that helped me stay conscious. It was my faith that pulled me through.”

It was well known among workers in Reynosa that the maquiladora bosses didn’t like sending injured employees to the government social security hospitals, where physicians were required by law to report workplace accidents. This would mean that the offending maquiladoras would have to pay more into the government’s social security system. It wasn’t uncommon for a worker with serious injuries to be offered first aid at the factory or be driven to a private clinic rather than be taken directly to the nearest hospital.

Ten minutes had already passed when Olmos and a few of the other men struck upon the idea of creating a makeshift jack. Using a steel pole, they pried the press open just enough for Rosa to pull out her hands. “I’ve seen many things in my life,” Olmos said, his voice lowering. “But this really had an impact on me.”

“I wasn’t bleeding very much because the press had actually forged the ends of my arms to the metal sheet,” Rosa said. “The piece was attached to my hands. I remember saying, ‘Take the piece off. Take it off.’ But they didn’t want to.”

The factory nurse came running. She covered Rosa’s hands with a white sheet. Again, some of the women fainted. The metallic clanging of the presses in their area had fallen silent, but in the rest of the factory, people kept working to meet their production quotas. “The nurse said I needed to be taken to the infirmary, but I asked what could she possibly do for me there?”

Two of the workers ran to get a stretcher. One of the men said he would drive Rosa to the social security hospital himself. “In the car, the nurse told me they’d take me to the general hospital or to the Red Cross, but I told her no,” Rosa said. “Like the other workers, I paid into the social security system, and I wanted to be taken to the social security hospital. She was very annoyed with me. But I insisted.”

At the government hospital, Rosa steeled herself for the worst. She knew her hands were destroyed and would have to be amputated. She was already thinking about the future, playing through the various crises that would unfold if she couldn’t work. She knew intimately what hunger felt like. That was why 11 years ago, she’d brought her children from the State of Mexico, in the center of the country, to Reynosa, traveling nearly 700 miles by bus so that she could work in the maquiladoras so her family would never go hungry again.

While Rosa was in the hospital, Cira went back to HD Electronics to try to discover what had caused the accident. At the factory, the general manager told Cira and the other workers that Rosa was at fault because she’d been too tired and wasn’t paying attention. But the machine had safety mechanisms to prevent accidents like the one Rosa had suffered. A worker had to press two buttons simultaneously to lower the press. This ensured that a worker didn’t have her hands inside the machine when the 200-ton press came down. Cira said she spoke to a maintenance man at the factory who confided to her that machine 19 hadn’t been properly maintained for months because taking it offline would slow production. Cira said she begged the man to come forward and testify on Rosa’s behalf, but he was too afraid of losing his job.

Five days after the accident, the bills were piling up at home. Rosa checked herself out of the hospital and went directly to HD Electronics to speak with the manager. He seemed shocked to see her in his office, her mutilated arms wrapped in white bandages. “He said, ‘Señora, why don’t you go home and rest.’ I said, ‘No, I want to have a meeting because you need to give me compensation. How will I feed my children?’”

The general manager said the company could offer her 50,000 pesos, approximately $3,800 in U.S. dollars, as a settlement.  “I told him, ‘I’m not going to accept that. I’ve lost both of my hands, how will my family survive on 50,000 pesos?’”

“That’s our offer,” the general manager said, according to Rosa. “Stop making such a big scandal about it and take it. It will help your family.”

But she refused. As a single parent, she had to do better for her family than 50,000 pesos. But the law wasn’t on her side. Mexico’s federal labor law mandates that the loss of each hand was worth 75 percent of two years’ wages. Rosa made $4,800 a year. That meant under the law her settlement should be about $14,400, much higher than what the company was offering but scarcely enough to replace a lifetime of lost wages.

Undeterred, Rosa, accompanied by Cira, set out to find a lawyer who would advocate for her in a settlement. They went from one law office to the next in Reynosa but were turned down by every attorney they spoke with. The two women, through another worker, learned that an employee at HD Electronics had been crushed to death in one of the larger presses two years earlier and his family had taken a settlement of 150,000 pesos, approximately $11,538. “The lawyers advised me to take the money because it was all they were required to pay under the law,” Rosa said.

There was also confusion about which company was responsible for Rosa’s compensation. In the past decade, many maquiladoras have outsourced labor contracting to outside companies to cut costs. These labor recruiters are charged with keeping the factories stocked with an unending supply of workers who will work without complaint no matter the conditions.

In the past dozen years, working conditions in maquiladoras have worsened. In 2000, foreign–owned companies began leaving Mexico and moving to China, where the average monthly wage for a factory worker is $160—less than half the wage of a Mexican worker. At least 200,000 Mexican workers lost their jobs, the majority of them in border cities like Reynosa.

Those still on the payroll were given more tasks and expected to work faster. A normal workweek became 48 hours, which is legal under Mexico’s labor laws. Eventually, companies began to return. Wages in China had quadrupled to bolster the emerging Chinese middle class, while Mexico’s wages had stagnated. Asian companies began to view Mexico’s northern border, with its infrastructure already in place, low tariffs and a skilled low-wage workforce, as a desirable location for expanding their market share in North America.

In 2006, HD Electronics moved from South Korea to Reynosa to service its main client, LG Electronics. LG had acquired the formerly U.S.-owned Zenith plant in Reynosa in 2000, launching its “Life’s Good” campaign in North America. The world’s second-largest supplier of liquid crystal and plasma televisions, LG announced in 2012 that its Reynosa factory made $2.5 billion in sales in the North American market. This year it plans to earn $3 billion.

Like most factory workers, Rosa was employed under temporary contracts with a local labor-staffing agency rather than as a full-time employee of the factory, where she might have received benefits. At the time of her accident, Rosa was an employee of neither HD Electronics nor LG Electronics. She was actually an employee of a Reynosa-based employment agency called Human Resources.

The owner of Human Resources declined to comment for this story. After I left several messages at the office of HD Electronics in Reynosa, Antonio Zapata, a human resources manager, said his company had no comment about Rosa’s case.

It’s unclear what corporate relationship, if any, there is between HD Electronics and LG Electronics. On HD’s website, LG Electronics is listed as its only client. John Taylor, vice president of LG Electronics USA, Inc., said HD Electronics is not a subsidiary of LG. “It is a separate company. One of the tens of thousands of LG’s vendors around the world,” Taylor wrote in an email.

Trying to navigate the various corporate entities was difficult. So Cira suggested Rosa go to the union for help. Every maquiladora worker is required to join a union and pay dues. The Industrial Union of Workers in Maquiladora Plants of Reynosa represented Rosa and other workers at HD Electronics. But when the two women arrived at the union office, they received little welcome. Cira said, “A man told us, ‘The person in charge is not here, what do you want?’ I said, ‘Don’t you have eyes? Can’t you see the person standing next to me?’” The man seemed unmoved by Rosa’s plight, Cira said. So the women left in disgust.

Rosa decided to try one more lawyer, who advertised around the city and had an upscale office in the nicer part of Reynosa. Again, Cira accompanied Rosa for moral support. “This was when I really lost faith,” Cira said. “This lawyer in his fancy office told Rosa, ‘You know what you should do, señora? Go up to the international bridge and put a cup out and people will help you. With your injuries you’ll make a lot of money.’” Cira’s face turned red remembering the meeting. Rosa stared at the floor. She couldn’t talk about it. “I couldn’t eat all day after that I was so upset,” Cira said. “I couldn’t imagine how anyone could say something like that.”

It was time to do something drastic. Cira convinced Rosa to call the local television station. A reporter came to Rosa’s house and interviewed her on camera about the accident. Other reporters followed, and the story got significant airplay in northern Mexico. The morning after Rosa’s first interview aired, an attorney from Human Resources arrived at her home. According to Rosa, the woman was upset with her portrayal of the factory and Human Resources. “Why did you go on television and tell lies about us?” the woman asked, according to Rosa. “Now, we’ll lose clients. We’ve made you an offer for a settlement, and we won’t offer another peso more.” Rosa declined the monetary settlement, but accepted the company’s offer of prosthetic hooks. Rosa sent her measurements to Monterrey and anxiously awaited their arrival. But when they came, the cheap prosthetics were too heavy and unwieldy to use, she said. “I would get so tired trying to make them work, and they would make my shoulders hurt, so I stopped using them.”

The night Rosa’s story aired on television, Paulina Hernandez, a maquiladora worker and longtime labor-rights activist, saw it, and vowed to find Rosa and help her. Hernandez is one of nine promotoras, or social workers, in Tamaulipas who works for the nonprofit Comite de Apoyo (Committee of Help) to educate maquila workers about labor laws and their rights. Ed Krueger, a retired minister from the Rio Grande Valley, worked with the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee to create the nonprofit in 1980. Now retired, the 82-year-old still visits Reynosa and neighboring Rio Bravo, dodging potholes and muffler-mangling speed bumps in his battered Ford Escort. Anyone who knows Krueger compares his easy affability to Mister Rogers, but with an iron will to get things done no matter the obstacle. Back in the 1980s, Krueger had been so effective at educating laborers about their rights, he’d received threats from corrupt union bosses and felt it prudent to stay out of Reynosa for nearly a decade. But in recent years he has resumed his regular visits. Even after gun battles erupted in Reynosa in 2010 among drug cartels and the military, and a number of Mexican reporters were kidnapped and killed and most Americans stopped crossing the border, Krueger wouldn’t stay away.

After Hernandez tracked down Rosa, she immediately called Krueger. He set about finding people who might help. I found Rosa through Austin photographer Alan Pogue, a longtime friend of Krueger.

In September, I accompanied Krueger to visit Rosa. As we drove up to a military checkpoint in Reynosa in Krueger’s Ford, he smiled and waved cheerily at the group of soldiers wearing dark sunglasses and draped in assault rifles. They waved us through with scarcely a glance.

Krueger is trying to raise money to bring Rosa to Texas, where she could be fitted for high-tech prosthetic hands that would allow her to support her family again. Meanwhile, unable to find anyone in Mexico who would represent her, Rosa filed a lawsuit in U.S. court against LG Electronics, Inc. John Taylor, spokesperson for LG, said in an email that there was no basis for the lawsuit.

“Ms. Moreno’s injuries were tragic, and LG Electronics extends its sympathies to Ms. Moreno and her family. At the same time I want to emphasize that in no way did LG Electronics cause or contribute to Ms. Moreno’s injuries, and LG Electronics bears no responsibility for them.  LG Electronics had no control over the machine that apparently malfunctioned and caused Ms. Moreno’s injuries. All that LG Electronics did was to purchase a part manufactured by [HD Electronics].”

The lawsuit is pending. These days Rosa receives the equivalent of $200 a month in government disability benefits. It has been nearly three years since she lost her hands. When I met with Rosa in September, her house was about to be repossessed. She couldn’t make the monthly payments on the tiny cinder-block home she and her husband had taken a mortgage on through the government-run Infonavit housing program. She worried she might end up on the streets soon, a cup in front of her, just as the lawyer had suggested.

She has little recourse. The NAFTA side agreement negotiated by Salinas and Clinton to protect workers 20 years ago never panned out. Under the agreement, workers, like Rosa, with grievances can request a hearing at a government entity called the National Administrative Office. From there, the complaint is sent to the respective country’s labor secretary for further consultation and eventually resolution.

But the system was set up to fail, according to NAFTA’s many critics. The handful of cases submitted were never resolved. A decade after NAFTA took effect, the UCLA Center for Labor, Research and Education found workers were already abandoning the process. “They are disillusioned and frustrated by the weak outcomes of ministerial consultations and the governments’ refusal to pursue even the best-documented cases,” the center concluded. Rosa, Paulina Hernandez and nearly a dozen other maquiladora workers I spoke with weren’t even aware that a grievance process through NAFTA existed. 

There’s no shortage of need. Having spent more than 30 years advocating for workers’ rights, Hernandez emphasized that what happened to Rosa isn’t unique; what makes Rosa different is her tenacity and willingness to speak out publicly. In three decades, Hernandez had seen dozens of illnesses, injuries and even deaths. Seldom had she seen a worker receive adequate compensation or government officials crack down on worker-safety violations. Maquiladoras wanting to protect the bottom line often underreport workplace injuries and fatalities so it’s difficult to get an idea of the true scope of the problem. In 2011, the year Rosa had her accident, the Mexican Social Security Institute, which oversees the government-run hospitals, reported just 17,302 workplace accidents. Advocates say that is likely a gross undercount. That same year, the United States, albeit with three times the population of Mexico, reported 2.8 million workplace accidents.

After visiting with Rosa, Krueger and I drove to the neighboring town of Rio Bravo. We arrived at a semi-desolate neighborhood of Infonavit-funded homes in the middle of a former sorghum field where many maquiladora workers live.  Maquiladoras pay 5 percent of their payroll taxes into Infonavit, the Spanish acronym for the Institute for the National Fund for Employee Housing, to help workers buy homes. But the agency has become infamous in Mexico for shoddy housing, cronyism and an inflexible bureaucracy.

The recently built rows of identical concrete homes felt impermanent and at the same time hopeful. It was an improvement over the makeshift shantytowns so many workers lived in on the outskirts of the city. But the neighborhood was a microcosm of the problems currently afflicting Mexico. Some homes were boarded up or had for-sale signs in the front windows advertising rock-bottom prices. Their former owners had lost their jobs and, unable to pay their mortgages, abandoned their homes. The families who remained—most of them first-time homebuyers—had painted their homes in hopeful blues or vibrant greens and planted decorative trees in front, trying to make the most of it.

But at the entrance to the neighborhood, men hawked black-market gasoline stolen from the government-owned oil monopoly from a flatbed truck. And nearby, state police armed with high-caliber assault rifles had set up a roadblock and were randomly stopping vehicles, especially those containing young men, pulling them out of their cars to be searched and sometimes detained.

In the living room of a bright-green house with a sparkling tile floor, we met with some of the other Comite de Apoyo promotoras and seven of their fellow maquiladora workers. One woman had her arm in a sling. She told me she was in acute pain after years of working in a U.S.-owned wheelchair factory and would have to have surgery, but the maquiladora wouldn’t acknowledge her injury as work-related. Another man had been exposed to dangerous solvents for years and had not been given any protective equipment. A man in a red baseball hat was so furious about the union’s refusal to help him in a work-related dispute that he spoke in rapid-fire bursts as if he might explode. During their years working in the maquiladoras, they told me, they’d seen numerous accidents, even deaths, and the conditions for workers were deteriorating.

“It’s our own government that has sold us out,” said the husband of the woman with the sling.  His wife, like the other women at the meeting, seemed to be taking her difficulties in stride, but her husband, like the man in the red cap, could barely contain his rage. “They’re enslaving us,” he said. “But what can we do? We have to eat. When we get hurt, they forget us. We are disposable.”

Afterward, on the way back to the international bridge, we stopped at a red light near Rosa’s house. Between the idling cars, a middle-aged man with no legs propping himself up on makeshift crutches held out a cup for change. Another man, who looked to be in his mid-20s, hobbled up to the car on his one leg and offered his outstretched hand. The light turned green, and a cacophony of car horns erupted. The young man stared blankly as the cars passed him by.

A fund has been established to help Rosa Moreno. You can make a donation here.  

While coal, oil, and gas are an integral part of everyday life around the world, 2013 brought a stark reminder of the inherent risk that comes with a fossil-fuel dependent world, with numerous pipeline spills, explosions, derailments, landslides, and the death of 20 coal miners in the U.S. alone.

Despite all this, our addiction to fossil fuels will be a tough habit to break. The federal Energy Information Administration in July projected that fossil fuel use will soar across the world in the come decades. Coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel in terms of carbon emissions — is projected to increase by 2.3 percent in coming years. And in December,the EIA said that global demand for oil would be even higher than it had projected, for both this year and next.

Here is a look back at some of the fossil fuel disasters that made headlines in 2013, along with several others that went largely unnoticed.

March 29: An ExxonMobil pipeline carrying Canadian Wabasca heavy crude from the Athabasca oil sands ruptures and spills thousands of barrels of oil in Mayflower, Arkansas. The ruptured pipeline gushed 210,000 gallons of heavy Canadian crude into a residential street and forced the evacuation of 22 homes. Exxon was hit with a paltry $2.6 million fine by federal pipeline safety regulators for the incident in November — just 1/3000th of its third quarter profits.

May 20: Underground tar sands leaks start popping up in Alberta, Canada, and do not stop for at least five months. In September the company responsible was ordered to drain a lake so that contamination on the lake’s bottom can be cleaned up. As of September 11, the leaks had spilled more than 403,900 gallons — or about 9,617 barrels — of oily bitumen into the surrounding boreal forest and muskeg, the acidic, marshy soil found in the forest.

July 30: About 50 tons of oil spills into the sea off Rayong province of Thailand from a leak in the pipeline operated by PTT Global Chemical Plc. It was the fourth major oil spill in the country’s history.

August 13: An ethane and propane pipeline belonging to Tesoro Corp. running beneath an Illinois cornfield ruptures and explodes. Residents heard a massive blast and then saw flames shooting 300 feet into the air, visible for 20 miles.

September 29: A North Dakota farmer winds up discovering the largest onshore oil spill in U.S. history, the size of seven football fields. At least 20,600 barrels of oil leaked from a Tesoro Corp-owned pipeline onto the Jensens’ land, and it went unreported to North Dakotans for more than a week. An AP investigation later discovered that nearly 300 oil spills and 750 “oil field incidents” had gone unreported to the public since January 2012.

October 7: An Oil and Natural Gas Corp. pipeline that carries crude from the offshore Mumbai High fields to India ruptures and spills at an onshore facility, but oil winds up flowing into the Arabian sea because of rainfall.

October 9: A natural gas pipeline explodes in northwest Oklahoma, sparking a large fire and prompting evacuations. No injuries or deaths were reported.

October 30: 17,000 gallons of crude oil spill from an eight-inch pipeline owned by Koch Pipeline Company in Texas. The spill impacted a rural area and two livestock ponds near Smithville and was discovered on a routine aerial inspection.

November 14: A Chevron natural gas pipeline explodes in Milford, Texas,causing the town of 700 people to evacuate. The flames could reportedly be seen for miles.

November 22: An oil pipeline explodes in Qingdao, China, killing 62 and setting ocean on fire. The underground pipeline’s explosion opened a hole in the road that swallowed at least one truck, according to Reuters, and oil seeped into utility pipes under Qingdao.

November 29: A 30-inch gas gas pipeline in a rural area of western Missouri ruptures and explodes, sending a 300 foot high fireball into the air.

February 11 An explosion in a coal mine in northern Russia kills at least 17 miners in a shaft saturated with methane gas. Rescue workers said 23 people had been in the shaft at the time. The blast occurred about 2,500 feet underground.

February 13: Very large landslide hits a colliery in Northern England. No injuries, but Dave Petley, a geology professor at Durham University, said it “may well be the largest and most significant landslide in the UK for a decade or more.”

February 13: A 28-year-old mining machine operator was killed when he was pinned between the tail of the remote controlled continuous mining machine and the coal rib in an underground mine in Illinois. Timothy Chamness had only been a mine machine operator for 6 months when the incident occurred.

February 14: A landslide hits the Phillippines’ largest open coal mining pit, burying at least 13 workers and killing at least 7. The accident was the third to occur in mining sites in the country over the last six months.

February 19: A large rock cliff collapses on top of a coal mine in southern China, burying and killing five people, including two children. An estimated 5,000 cubic metres of rock fell on Yudong village in Kaili, in the country’s Guizhou province.

March 13: A 63-year-old man with 40 years of mining experience was killed underground when he was struck by a large piece of roof rock. The rock that fell was approximately 6 feet long by 5.5 feet wide and about 5 inches thick.

March 29 and April 1: The Babao Coal mine explosions kill 53 people in China. The coal mine company responsible, Tonghua Mining (Group) Co. Ltd., was later found to have concealed the death toll in the incidents, additionally concealing deaths of six workers in five accidents in 2012.

May 11: Illegal mining causes an explosion in a Chinese coal mine that killed 28 and left 18 injured. China orders production suspension at all coal mines in the southwestern province of Sichuan, China’s 16th-biggest coal producing province, after the blast.

July 16: A landslide at a coal mine in Bulgaria claims the lives of two people who were discovered underneath 50 meters of land mass. It was the fourth major landslide in the Oranovo mine in the past eight years.

August 10: Seven people in India are killed after a landslide in a coal mine in the Sundergarh district of Odisha. The incident occurred while people from nearby villages were collecting coal from the “over-burdened” dump yard located near the mining area.

November 23: While working inside a coal mine in Ohio, a 32-year-old manwas killed when he was struck by high pressure hydraulic fluid after a valve broke. Ryan Lashley had worked at The Century Mine, which was the site of another near-fatal accident that month.

November 27: A coal mine in northern China’s Shanxi Province is hit with a landslide that buried several excavators and kills two people.

December 4: Gas explodes in a coal mine early in eastern China’s Jiangxi province, killing at least six workers.

January 22: A Devon Energy natural gas rig in Utah catches fire, causing evacuations for half a mile radius of the rig. No injuries are reported.

July 7: A hydraulic fracturing operation at a gas well drilling pad in West Virginia explodes and injures seven people, four with potentially life-threatening burns. The explosion occurred while workers were pumping water down a well, part of the hydraulic fracturing process for recovering gas trapped in shale rock. The tanks that recover the water and chemical mixture after they return to the surface are what reportedly exploded.

July 27: BP’s Hercules 265 offshore gas rig in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana explodes, enveloping the rig in a cloud of gas and a thin sheen of gas in the water. After spewing gas for more than a day, the rig finally “bridged over,” meaning small pieces of sediment and sand blocked more gas from escaping.

August 20: A gas rig belonging to the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan exploded in the Caspian sea while workers were carrying out exploratory drilling, when it hit a pocket of gas at unexpectedly high pressure.

August 28: A “well-control incident” at an oil drilling rig in rural south Texas causes an “intense” explosion after workers were drilling horizontally into the Eagle Ford Shale, causing homes to be evacuated. No injuries reported.

March 27: A Canadian Pacific Railway train derails, spilling 30,000 gallons of tar sands oil in western Minnesota.Reuters called it “the first major spill of the modern North American crude-by-rail transit boom.”

July 6: A unit, 74-car freight train carrying Bakken formation crude oil derails in Lac-Megantic, Canada, causing an incredibly tragic fire and explosion. Forty-two people were pronounced dead, 30 buildings downtown destroyed. Emergency responders describe a “war zone.” 2,000 people evacuated because of toxic fumes, explosions, and fires.

July 18: 24 cars of a 150-car coal train derail in Virginia, spilling more than a thousand tons of coal along the roadside.

October 19: A train carrying crude oil and liquefied petroleum gas derails west of Alberta, Canada, causing an explosion and fire. No injuries were reported. Nine of the derailed cars were carrying liquefied petroleum gas and four carried crude. The crude oil cars were intact and kept away from the fires with no indications of any leaks.

November 8: A 90-car train carrying North Dakota crude derails and explodes in a rural area of western Alabama. Flames spewed into the air on a Friday, only finally dying down by Sunday, in what the Huffington Post called “the most dramatic U.S. accident since the oil-by-rail boom began.”

December 9: 19 cars of a coal train near the Las Vegas Motor Speedway derail, spilling coal onto the ground. The train had four locomotives with 103 cars, each carrying about 75 tons of coal. The train was headed from a mine in Carbon County, Utah, to a utility company in Mojave, California.

April 4: Federal safety officials eventually make Georgia Power pay $119,000 in penalties after an explosion at one of its coal plants. The blast injured two people and was caused by a buildup of hydrogen and air inside a generator.

April 5: Residents near an ExxonMobil refinery begin to smell “burning tires and oil” after the refinery leaked condensate water that accumulated while the company was flaring gas. Through the leak, ExxonMobil announced that it had released 100 pounds of hydrogen sulfide and 10 pounds of benzene. According to readings at the spill site, the refinery measured 160 parts per million of hydrogen sulfide and 2 parts per million of benzene in the air.

August 8 and 15: 15,000 liters of oil spills into local streams in Cuba, aftertwo separate instances at the Sergio Soto Refinery. The oil spill was the result of a negligent operator who failed to properly secure the residuals trap used to contain the hydrocarbon. While some of the oil was able to be contained, much of it was pushed upstream because of strong rainfall following the spill.

August 28: Approximately 20 gallons of partially refined petroleum from a New Jersey refinery spills into the Delaware River, after a leak in a heat exchanger that is part of the refinery’s crude oil processing unit. The spill was reported two hours after workers discovered it, when they realized it was going into the river.

September 10: An explosion at the Deely 1 coal power unit in Pennsylvania caused cascade housing damage. The explosion happened after coal dust in a silo caught fire.

January 27: A barge carrying 668,000 gallons of light crude oil on the Mississippi River crashed into a railroad bridge. An 80,000 gallon tank on the vessel was damaged, spilling oil into the waterway, which prompted officials to close the river for eight miles in either direction.

September 15: Fuel tanks explode at Virgin Islands gas station, resulting in a huge blast and a fire and causing two injuries. The St. Thomas community of Bovoni was evacuated and traffic was diverted after the explosion.

October 1: An underground fuel reservoir explodes on a Czech Lukoil petrol station on a highway in Prague, killing one person and injuring two.

November 23: Five are hurt after a gas tank near a drilling rig explodes in Wyoming.

December 14: Thousands of gallons of gasoline spill into a harbor in southern Alaska on Saturday after a pump used to funnel fuel into boats is accidentally severed. The 5,500 gallon spill occurred in the small village of the village of Kake, whose residents rely on fish and subsistence to get by.

With a name like perfluorotributylamine, the latest greenhouse gas to be discovered is a tongue twister. But you should learn how to say it, as this synthetic chemical could mean dangerous business for the climate.

Perfluorotributylamine (or PFTBA) is an artificial compound commonly used since the 1950’s in electrical equipment and heat transfer agents. According to a recent  study in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters , PFTBA has a significantly higher capacity to capture solar radiation than carbon dioxide. How significant? PFTBA is about 7,100 times more effective than CO2 at heating the globe over a 100-year span.

"We claim that PFTBA has the highest radiative efficiency of any molecule detected in the atmosphere to date," Angela Hong, a Toronto based co-author of the report, told The Guardian.

Furthermore, the molecule can stay in the atmosphere for quite a long time – about 500 years. This longevity greatly exceeds CO2, which is constantly being cycled back into organic material through ecological processes (although not nearly as quickly as it is emitted by industrial sources).

But don’t panic yet. Based on measurements taken in Toronto, the gas is 0.18 parts per trillion in the atmosphere. When compared to carbon dioxide levels – now at 400 parts per million – that is a tiny contribution to global temperature rise.

"From a climate change perspective, individually, PFTBA's atmospheric concentration does not significantly alert the phenomenon of climate change," Hong said. "Still the biggest culprit is CO2from fossil fuel emissions."

The researchers note that CO2 is still the main driver of global warming, and that we shouldn’t lose our focus on curbing those emissions. According the  Environmental Protection Agency, CO2emission in the US alone accounts for approximately 84 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, which is then followed by methane (9 percent), nitrous oxide (5 percent), and fluorinated gases (2 percent). While PFTBA is not a major contributor to warming at this point, the impact could be terrible were its levels to rise.

The new study underscores another concern: Namely, no one is quite sure how many unknown greenhouse gases are out there. Many industrial compounds aren’t regulated, and quite often data on chemicals is lacking, or protected as industry secrets.

"PFTBA is just one example of an industrial chemical that is produced, but there are no policies that control its production, use or emission," Hong said. "It is not being regulated by any type of climate policy."

Mexico was said to be one step away from entering the “First World.” It was December 1992, and Mexico’s then-president, Carlos Salinas, signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The global treaty came with major promises of economic development, driven by increased farm production and foreign investment, that would end emigration and eliminate poverty. But, as the environmentalist Gustavo Castro attests in our video, the results have been the complete opposite—increased emigration, hunger and poverty.

While the world was entertaining the idea of the end of times supposedly predicted by the Mayan calendar, on December 21, 2012, over 40,000 Mayan Zapatis . tas took to the streets to make their presence known in a March of Silence. The  indigenous communities of Chiapas—Tzeltales, Tzotziles, Tojolobales, Choles, Zoques and Mames—began their mobilization from their five centers of government, which are called  Caracoles. In silence they entered the fog of a December winter and occupied the same squares, in the same cities, that they had descended upon as ill-equipped rebels on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA came into effect.

In light of the 20th anniversary of NAFTA’s implementation and the Zapatista uprising, we set out to explore both the positive and negative effects of the international treaty. The poverty caused by NAFTA, and the waves of violence, forced migration and environmental disasters it has precipitated, should not be understated. The republic of Mexico is under threat from multinational corporations like the Canadian mining company Blackfire Explorations, which is  threatening to sue the state of Chiapas for $800 million under NAFTA Chapter 11 because its government closed a Blackfire barite mine after pressure from local environmental activists like Mariano Abarca Roblero, who was  murdered in 2009.

Still, one result of the corporate extraction of Mexico’s natural resources and displacement of its people that has followed the treaty has been the organization and strengthening of initiatives by indigenous communities to construct autonomy from the bottom up. Seeing that their own governments cannot respond to popular demands without retribution from corporations, the people of Mexico are asking about alternatives: “What is it that we do want?” The Zapatista revolution reminds us that not only another world, but many other worlds, are possible

EDELO, short for “En Donde Era La ONU,” is an experimental artistic space and residency in Chiapas, Mexico. Its name, which means “Where the United Nations Used to Be,” comes from its establishment in offices ceded by the UN after disillusioned indigenous community members occupied the space in fall of 2009.