Today, Global Community is Noah's Ark

India is the third largest country in terms of carbon emission. India is the second largest country in terms of population. India is the the country to hold the biggest democratic elections in the world! To exclude the rest, these three factors are enough to highlight the rising importance of India globally. Still, why is there a deafening silence on climate change in India, not only by the media but also by the politicians, subsequently followed by the people as the two former agencies are responsible for prioritizing any agenda.

Politicians and public opinion

Any observer with sound knowledge of Indian society can easily differentiate between the real issues of the country and the not-so-real issues which the politicians exploit for their own benefit . A classic example of this is how, “.....both 1992 and 2002 (riots) did was to fool people into believing that the communal divide is greater than the class divide. “As soon as you convince a society that Muslims or whatever group is the problem, you have tricked them into overlooking the real problems like labour laws, corruption, housing shortages, and poor infrastructure (and climate change), Sinha said.” The point that I am trying to make is that, politicians have always deceived people into believing, prioritizing and acting on issues that are of less importance than the once that require immediate attention. And the same happened during the general elections. Issues like Congress free India, Modi's superiority over Rahul Gandhi, and the need to replicate the development model of western countries in India as the only solution for its problems. Amidst all this, not a single senior politician, be it Modi, Rahul Gandhi or any other influential leader ever questioned   this model of development, neither did they ever mentioned the threat of climate change, as if it were non-existent, as the $900 million anti-climate change think tanks in America would want us to believe.

Media on public opinion

The power that media yields is known by all and requires no in-depth explanation here. Yet, the media in India never chooses to exercise its power to influence public opinion on climate change. TV coverage of environment news in less than one percent! Be it print media or the TV. It's only on the internet that a few niche climate change media outlets and organizations along with a few individuals on social media that are busy doing the job of the mainstream news media. Instead on focusing on issues, the media focuses of personalities, as was evident by the complete surrender of media to Narendra Modi during the general elections. The root of the problem is the advertising-driven revenue system of the news media and also its slow but complete take over by big corporations. Now that Mukesh Ambani's Reliance has acquired complete ownership of India's biggest media company Network 18, there would be hardly be any report seen about Reliance's misdeeds in the news channels owned by the company. This is true not only for Reliance but also for other major companies who have heavily invested in other news companies.

Interrogation

We must question, why is it that neither the politicians, neither a “free” media and nor do the people ever talk about climate change with any seriousness? Why can't political parties not organize people again to fight climate change as it does during its political rallies? Why is it that some bolloywood personalities' personal life have become more important an issue than climate change which has fatal effects? Why is it that the climate change has not become an everyday issue with people? Why don't we take it with as seriousness as we take other things like celebrating a festival?

Invoking  conscientizacao on climate change is the primary responsibility of the media which must result in action by the politicians.

And what are the people and civil society to do?

Well, they must act together on their own and ensure that people who yield power in the name of democracy perform their duty well. This is our only hope.

Avinay Umesh-Saiyogita lives in Bombay and work with Centre for Education and Documentation .

Regarding what caused the downing of the Malaysian airliner MH-17 in Ukraine on July 17th, the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, reported in  a brief Russian-language news story on August 12th , that four days earlier (August 8th) a representative of that nation's Prosecutor General office, Yuri Boychenko, had said that (as auto-translated by google), “the results [of the investigation] will be announced upon completion of the investigation and with the consent of all the parties who signed the corresponding agreement.” This UNIAN report said that, "As part of the four-party agreement signed on August 8 between Ukraine, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia [all of which nations are allies of the United States and are cooperating with its new Cold War against Russia ], information on the investigation into the disaster Malaysian ‘Boeing-777' will not be disclosed." In other words: the official 'investigation' is being carried out by four nations that, as U.S. allies, are hostile toward Russia. One of those four nations, Ukraine, is not only a prime suspect in possibly having shot this airliner down , but is currently  waging a hot war to ethnically-cleanse the pro-Russian population out of southeastern Ukraine ; and the initial 'news' reports in Western 'news' media regarding the downing of MH-17 had stenographically repeated the Ukrainian Goverhment's line that said that this airliner was probably downed by the local rebels there, who were trying to shoot down the Ukrainian Government's bombers that are constantly bombing them . Some Western 'news' reports even speculated that perhaps Russia itself had shot this airliner down. If the UNIAN news-report is correct, then there is no way that the 'investigation' will be able to be released to the public if it indicates that the Ukrainian Government (which, according to that news-report has  veto power   over the making-public of the study's findings) is blamed for having shot the airliner down.

On August 12th, another pro-Ukrainian-Government 'news' site, gordonua.com , headlined, as auto-translated by google,  "GPU: The results of the investigation [into the] crash [of] the Boeing 777 will be released with the consent of the parties,"  and said, "Information about the accident MH17 in the Donetsk region will be published in obtaining the consent of all the parties that are involved in the investigation." UNIAN was cited there as gordonua's sole source. ‘News' media didn't probe the matter further. 

Until 23 August 2014, that seems to have been the last of the matter, as far as news reports were concerned, and both of those two news reports were just tiny squibs in the Russian language, published only in Ukraine, by supporters of the Obama-installed Ukrainian Government. The news was ignored both inside and outside Ukraine. 

Then, on 23 August 2014, Global Research News published the first English-language news-report on this matter; it was based on the second Russian-language news-report, the one that had appeared at gordonua.com on August 12th. Global Research concluded from it that,  “The Causes of the MH17 Crash are ‘Classified'."  Of course, this way of phrasing the matter is a slight oversimplification, because, actually, the findings will remain 'classified' only if, and to the extent that , the Ukrainian Government is found to have caused the airliner's downing. In other words: this 'investigation' will not be published unless the Ukrainian Government and the other three nations that are performing it agree unanimously to publish it.

So: imagine a murder-case in which 298 innocents are slaughtered, and in which there are only three suspects (here: Ukraine, the pro-Russian rebels, and Russia itself), and one of those three suspects has veto-power on the making-public of the 'investigation' into that crime. Well: this is that murder-case, and the veto-holding ‘investigator' and suspect is Ukraine. Neither of the other two suspects holds any such veto-power over this ‘investigation.'

In a sense, whether the official investigation into the downing will ever be made public is insignificant, just as would be any 'investigation' that is carried out by, or with veto-power from, one of the prime suspects in the crime that is being investigated.

The international public would obviously need to be fools in order for them to trust such an 'investigation' as that. Case closed?

President Obama got the economic-sanctions-increase against Russia, that he had wanted out of this shoot-down. Who needs any 'investigation' to determine this mass-killing's actual perpetrator? Certainly not Obama.  Ultimately, it is he who caused it, because he was the person behind this ethnic-cleansing campaign, without which ethnic-cleansing campaign the airliner itself wouldn't have been downed.

The downing of this airliner goes  straight back  to  the U.S. White House , which has already won what it wanted from it.

Those 298 corpses are just casualties of  this U.S.-caused war , like the Ukrainians are casualties of it  who live in the portions of Ukraine  that had overwhelmingly elected in 2010 the Ukrainian President whom Obama ousted from office in 2014. Obama doesn't want a President like that elected ever again in Ukraine; so, those voters are being gotten rid of, and ethnic cleansing is how it's being done. And  the residents there are likewise not being heard from in Western 'news' media, and nobody in the West is asking these victims what they think of the Ukrainian Government that Obama installed . Perhaps that's because they are increasingly becoming a guerilla army to defeat the regime that Obama installed. 

As to the specific operation that downed the plane, there is already a lot more information about that than the official 'investigation,' if that's ever published, is likely to reveal, and  it points clearly to the Ukrainian military as the perpetrator, in yet another of their 'false flag' operations. And unlike the Ukrainian Government's charges that rebels shot it down by mistake, Ukraine shot it down with deadly purpose and knowing full well what they were doing.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of   They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 ,   and of  CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .

Peter Haisenko was a pilot for Lufthansa for 30 years. In the article below he explains his conclusion that the Malaysian airliner downed in Ukraine was hit first by an air-to-air missile from a Ukrainian fighter jet and then by machine gun fire. As Ukrainian air control has refused to release its communications with the airliner and Washington refuses to release its satellite photos, we have to form a judgment based on experience and available evidence. This judgment is superior to unsupported propagandistic claims. The withholding of pertinent information suggests that Washington and/or Kiev are responsible for the downed airliner.

Seven weeks have passed since the downing of MH 017 and we have still not been provided with official investigation results. This is an extraordinary circumstance, but ultimately not surprising. Just a few days after the crash of the airliner a short message was published that in this case the debris of the wreck will not be collected to be put together like a puzzle. However, this would have been the normal procedure if there were serious interest to determine the cause of the accident objectively.

When an airplane crashes, within 24 hours there are usually legions of experts at the scene who register everything in detail and start collecting the debris. First of all experts of the plane manufacturer are sent to the scene — in this case Boeing – followed by the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), and by specialists and experts from the countries concerned. In addition to the flight recorder, these specialists are responsible for an examination of the debris. Normally, the airplane is reconstructed from the pieces in order to determine the cause of the crash.

Yet in the case of MH 017 normal procedures were not followed. No representatives from Boeing appeared on the site. The airliner was not pieced together in order to determine the cause of its destruction. The information in the black boxes has not been revealed. Therefore, we have to arrive at a conclusion based on experience and the information available.

Investigation is further impeded by the establishment in the media of the Western propaganda line that Russia and the separatists are responsible. This “guilt” has been established by insinuation and repetition of charges unsupported by any evidence. Those who challenge the “official” story that the airliner was destroyed by a missile fired from the ground by separatists are said to be “conspiracy theorists.” In other words, those with experience are discredited before they speak.

The West has control of the investigation and apparently has decided not to investigate. However, we do have two critical pieces of information. One is the report of the Canadian representative of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that reports bullet holes in the cockpit section of the airliner. Photos are available that clearly show bullet holes in the pattern of machine gun fire on both sides of the airliner’s cockpit. The other piece of information comes from a report in the Malaysian newspaper New Straits Times that intelligence analysts have concluded that one of the airliner’s engines was hit by a heat-seeking air-to-air missile. We know that there were Ukrainian jets armed with such weapons close to the airliner at the time that it crashed. http://www.nst.com.my/node/20925&nbsp

These two pieces of information support my conclusion of what happened based on my experience and my research:

A warplane fired an air-to-air missile which hit the right engine of MH 017. In the cockpit of the MH 017 only a violent shock could be perceived, along with the fire alarm and the failure notice of engine number two. Pilots would be aware of engine failure, not of a missile strike. The missile hit might have caused a strong yawning moment and an immediate drop in speed. The pilots instantly had to initiate emergency procedures for this emergency, and were concentrated on it with full attention.

According to procedural rule, the pilots had to turn the engine off, isolate it, reduce speed and altitude. Afterwards they had to select and head for an emergency landing place and inform the ground control about their emergency situation as soon as possible. A captain in an emergency situation may do everything to save his plane, his own life and the lives of his passengers.

He has the so-called “emergency authority” that allows actions outside of any provision. The nearest major airport for the pilots of MH 017 for an emergency landing was probably Kiev. Rostov in Russia was closer, but in order to go to Rostov the pilots would have had to cope with a change of the control center and a border crossing, which would have meant extra stress.

MH 017 had therefore initiated a curve back towards Kiev in connection with a descent. Now just imagine, that MH 017 would have landed in Kiev. In Kiev it could not have been disguised that the airliner had been hit by an air-to-air missile. The emergency landing procedure had to be prevented – no matter on what airport. This was achieved by machine gun fire.

The fact that an investigation apparently has been stymied is strong circumstantial evidence for the account of the airliner’s demise offered in this article.

The slaughter fits the classic definition of Genocide Convention Article II of, “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, and who in 1991 filed a class-action complaint with the UN against President George H.W. Bush.

The U.S. and U.K. “obstinately insisted” that their sanctions remain in place until after the “illegal” Gulf War II aggression perpetrated by President George W. Bush and UK’s Tony Blair in March, 2003, “not with a view to easing the over decade-long suffering of the Iraqi people and children” but “to better facilitate the U.S./U.K. unsupervised looting and plundering of the Iraqi economy and oil fields in violation of the international laws of war as well as to the grave detriment of the Iraqi people,” Boyle said.

In an address last Nov. 22 to The International Conference on War-affected Children in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Boyle tallied the death toll on Iraq by U.S.-U.K. actions as follows:

# The slaughter of 200,000 Iraqis by President Bush in his illegal 1991 Gulf War I.

# The deaths of 1.4 million Iraqis as a result of the illegal 2003 war of aggression ordered by President Bush Jr. and Prime Minister Blair.

# The deaths of 1.7 million Iraqis “as a direct result” of the genocidal sanctions.

Boyle’s class-action complaint demanded an end to all economic sanctions against Iraq; criminal proceedings for genocide against President George H.W. Bush; monetary compensation to the children of Iraq and their families for deaths, physical and mental injury; and for shipping massive humanitarian relief supplies to that country.

The “grossly hypocritical” UN refused to terminate the sanctions, Boyle pointed out, even though its own Food and Agricultural Organization’s Report estimated that by 1995 the sanctions had killed 560,000 Iraqi children during the previous five years.

Boyle noted that then U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright was interviewed on CBS-TV on May 12, 1996, in response to a question by Leslie Stahl if the price of half a million dead children was worth it, and replied, “we (the U.S. government) think the price is worth it.”

Albright’s shocking response provides “proof positive of the genocidal intent by the U.S. government against Iraq” under the Genocide Convention, Boyle said, adding that the government of Iraq today could still bring legal action against the U.S. and the U.K. in the International Court of Justice. He said the U.S.-U.K. genocide also violated the municipal legal systems of all civilized nations in the world; the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child; and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and its Additional Protocol 1 of 1977.

Boyle, who was stirred to take action pro bono by Mothers in Iraq after the economic sanctions had been imposed upon them by the Security Council in August, 1990, in response to pressure from the Bush Senior Administration. He is the author of numerous books on international affairs, including “Destroying World Order” (Clarity Press.)

(Sherwood Ross is a columnist, broadcast commentator and public relations consultant “for good causes.” He formerly reported for major dailies and wire services and is the author of “Gruening of Alaska”(Best). Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com )

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On Sunday, September 21st, a huge crowd will march through the middle of Manhattan.  It will almost certainly be the largest rally about climate change in human history, and one of the largest political protests in many years in New York. More than 1,000 groups are coordinating the march -- environmental justice groups, faith groups, labor groups -- which means there’s no one policy ask. Instead, it’s designed to serve as a loud and pointed reminder to our leaders, gathering that week at the United Nations to discuss global warming, that the next great movement of the planet’s citizens centers on our survival and their pathetic inaction.

As a few of the march’s organizers, though, we can give some sense of why we, at least, are marching, words we think represent many of those who will gather at Columbus Circle for the walk through midtown Manhattan.

We march because the world has left the Holocene behind: scientists tell us that we’ve already raised the planet’s temperature almost one degree Celsius, and are on track for four or five by century’s end. We march because Hurricane Sandy filled the New York City subway system with salt water, reminding us that even one of the most powerful cities in the world is already vulnerable to slowly rising ocean levels.

We march because we know that climate change affects everyone, but its impacts are not equally felt: those who have contributed the least to causing the crisis are hit hardest, here and around the world. Communities on the frontlines of global warming are already paying a heavy price, in some cases losing the very land on which they live. This isn’t just about polar bears any more.

But since polar bears can’t march, we march for them, too, and for the rest of creation now poised on the verge of what biologists say will be the planet’s sixth great extinction event, one unequalled since the last time a huge asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago.

And we march for generations yet to come, our children, grandchildren, and their children, whose lives will be systematically impoverished and degraded. It’s the first time one century has wrecked the prospects of the millennia to come, and it makes us mad enough to march.

We march with hope, too. We see a few great examples around the world of how quickly we could make the transition to renewable energy. We know that if there were days this summer when Germany generated nearly 75% of its power from renewable sources of energy, the rest of us could, too -- especially in poorer nations around the equator that desperately need more energy. And we know that labor-intensive renewables would provide far more jobs than capital-intensive coal, gas, and oil.

And we march with some frustration: why haven’t our societies responded to 25 years of dire warnings from scientists? We’re not naïve; we know that the fossil fuel industry is the 1% of the 1%. But sometimes we think we shouldn’t have to march. If our system worked the way it should, the world would long ago have taken the obvious actions economists and policy gurus have recommended -- from taxing carbon to reflect the damage it causes to funding a massive World War II-scale transition to clean energy.

Marching is not all, or even most, of what we do. We advocate; we work to install solar panels; we push for sustainable transit. We know, though, that history shows marching is usually required, that reason rarely prevails on its own. (And we know that sometimes even marching isn’t enough; we’ve been to jail and we’ll likely be back.)

We’re tired of winning the argument and losing the fight. And so we march. We march for the beaches and the barrios. We march for summers when the cool breeze still comes down in the evening. We march because Exxon spends $100 million every day looking for more hydrocarbons, even though scientists tell us we already have far more in our reserves than we can safely burn. We march for those too weak from dengue fever and malaria to make the journey. We march because California has lost 63 trillion gallons of groundwater to the fierce drought that won’t end, and because the glaciers at the roof of Asia are disappearing. We march because researchers told the world in April that the West Antarctic ice sheet has begun to melt “irrevocably”; Greenland’s ice shield may soon follow suit; and the waters from those, as rising seas, will sooner or later drown the world’s coastlines and many of its great cities.

We don’t march because there’s any guarantee it will work. If you were a betting person, perhaps you’d say we have only modest hope of beating the financial might of the oil and gas barons and the governments in their thrall. It’s obviously too late to stop global warming entirely, but not too late to slow it down -- and it’s not too late, either, to simply pay witness to what we’re losing, a world of great beauty and complexity and stability that has nurtured humanity for thousands of years.

There’s a world to march for -- and a future, too. The only real question is why anyone wouldn’t march.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us onFacebookandTumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit'sMen Explain Things to Me.

Copyright 2014 Eddie Bautista, La Tonya Crisp-Sauray, and Bill McKibben

© 2014 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175894/

Eddie Bautista is executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. LaTonya Crisp-Sauray is the recording secretary for the Transport Workers Union Local 100. Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org and a TomDispatch regular.

An alarming new study has found that human activities mostly associated with burning fossil fuels has resulted in a massive increase in the levels of toxic mercury in the world’s oceans.

Published last week in the prestigious international journal Nature, the study,  A global ocean inventory of anthropogenic mercury based on water column measurements, revealed that levels of the environmental poison in marine waters less than 100 metres deep have more than tripled since the Industrial Revolution.

Using water samples collected during research trips in the Pacific, Atlantic, Southern and Arctic oceans from 2006 until 2011, scientists analyzed mineral mercury levels attributed to fossil fuels, mining and sewage in both shallow and deep seawater.

While they found that mercury levels in ocean waters less than 100 metres deep had increased by a factor of 3.4 since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, concentrations of mercury throughout the entire ocean had only jumped about 10 percent.

The scientists were affiliated with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Wright State University, Observatoire Midi-Pyréneés in France, and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.

“With the increases we’ve seen in the recent past, the next 50 years could very well add the same amount we’ve seen in the past 150,”  said Woods Hole marine chemist Carl Lamborg, who led the study.

“The trouble is, we don’t know what it all means for fish and marine mammals. It likely means some fish also contain at least three times more mercury than 150 years ago, but it could be more. The key is now we have some solid numbers on which to base continued work.”

Medical experts have long been warning people — especially pregnant women and small children — to limit or avoid eating some fish like albacore tuna and swordfish because toxic levels of mercury have been found to accumulate in certain species. Numerous studies have shown that  mercury can cause reproductive and neurological problems.

According to an accompanying Nature article, the scientists said ocean circulation patterns have helped to blunt the effects of some of the rise in marine mercury.

“Circulation patterns that drive very cold, salty and dense water to sink into the deep ocean carry large amounts of mercury from shallower depths where life abounds,” the  article said.

“That provides some protection to marine life, as mercury’s toxic effects magnify with every step up the food chain. For example, the mercury levels in a top predator such as tuna are 10 million times higher than those in the surrounding seawater.”

But Lamborg added that the deep water’s ability to sequester mercury may soon be exhausted.

“You’re starting to overwhelm the ability of deep water formation to hide some of that mercury from us, with the net result that more and more of our emissions will be found in progressively shallower water,” Lamborg was quoted as saying, an event that would increase the odds that mercury levels in key food species will rise, furthering humans’ exposure.

The impact of climate change has some people turning to walking more and driving less. But the reality is that simply by eating less beef, you could have an even greater impact in the fight against global warming.

A recent report from the Guardian states that, “The popular red meat requires 28 times more land to produce than pork or chicken, 11 times more water and results in five times more climate-warming emissions. When compared to staples like potatoes, wheat, and rice, the impact of beef per calorie is even more extreme, requiring 160 times more land and producing 11 times more greenhouse gases.”

The reality is that agriculture has one of the most devastating impacts on global warming and accounts for 15% of all emissions. But livestock in particular plays the largest role accounting for half of the emissions.

Professor Gidon Eschel of Bard College in New York notes that part of the problem is government subsidies, which favor a meat-eating diet. "Remove the artificial support given to livestock industry and rising prices will do the rest. In that way you are having less government intervention in people's diets and not more," Eschel told the Guardian.

Professor Tim Benton at the University of Leeds agreed. "The biggest intervention people could make towards reducing their carbon footprints would not be to abandon cars, but to eat significantly less meat," he said.

Eschel published his findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The beef industry, he discovered, is the worst environmental offender, and grass-fed cattle have as great as impact as grain-fed beef. Not only does beef require more feed than pigs or chickens, but, "Only a minute fraction of the food consumed by cattle goes into the bloodstream, so the bulk of the energy is lost."

Next time you consider buying an ultra-efficient car, why not just skip the hamburger instead?

Clarissa A. Leon is AlterNet's food editor. She formerly served as an investigative research assistant at The Daily Beast and The Nation Institute. 

The World Heritage site on the north-east coast is "under pressure" and its capacity to recover could be weakening, said a report from the Great Barrier Marine Park Authority, released late Tuesday.

"Climate change remains the most serious threat to the Great Barrier Reef," the report said.  "It is already affecting the reef and is likely to have far-reaching consequences in the decades to come."

The marine park authority said that despite actions taken to protect the area since its last report in 2009, "the greatest risks to the Great Barrier Reef have not changed." 

"Climate change, poor water quality from land-based run-off, impacts from coastal development, and some remaining impacts of fishing remain the major threats to the future vitality of the Great Barrier Reef."

It added that "the overall outlook for the Great Barrier Reef is poor."

"Greater reductions of all threats at all levels, reef-wide, regional and local, are required to prevent the projected declines in the Great Barrier Reef and to improve its capacity to recover."

The report, which included contributions from the Australian and Queensland state governments, came two months after UNESCO deferred listing the reef as in danger.  The UN cultural body gave Australia until Feb. 1, 2015 to submit a report on what it was doing to protect the biodiverse site.  While key habitats, species and ecosystems in the central and southern inshore areas of the reef continue to deteriorate, its northern third has good water quality and its ecosystem is in good condition, the marine authority's report said.

The number of dugongs—a long-lived but slow-breeding sea mammal—continue to decline from very low levels, but the population of other species such as humpback whales, estuarine crocodiles and loggerhead turtles are growing.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt said he is confident his government will be able to do enough to stop the reef from being listed as in danger, such as reducing port developments.

"The report is a mixture of pressure and progress," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.  "In the south, there were some real negatives, to be honest. Now is the moment that we have to turn around the reef."

The World Wildlife Fund said "billions not millions" of dollars need to be invested in the reef to reduce pollution and repair degraded ecosystems.  "One concrete step governments can take to reduce pressure on the reef is to prohibit dumping of dredge spoil in the World Heritage Area," WWF's Australian head Dermot O'Gorman said in a statement.

Conservationists have criticised the approval of a major coal port expansion at Abbot Point, on the Great Barrier Reef coast, that requires the dredging of three million cubic metres of material from the seabed so freighters can dock. 

Recently published data collected by the World Meteorological Organization shows there were close to five times as many weather- and climate-change-related disasters in the first decade of this century than in the 1970s.

As many as 1.94 million people lost their lives due to these catastrophic weather events between 1970 and 2012, which cost $2.4 trillion U.S. in economic losses, according to the  Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes (1970–2012).

The 44-page atlas, a joint publication of the Geneva-based UN agency WMO and the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, examined major reported disasters linked to weather, climate and water extremes.

The atlas included 8,835 major disasters in the four decades between 1970 and 2010. The largest increase, however, was between 1971 and 1980 with 743 extreme events and 2001 and 2010 with 3,496 events.

Flooding and storms were the main cause of the disasters in the last decade but the data also shows heat waves are becoming more deadly and more common.

“Disasters caused by weather, climate, and water-related hazards are on the rise worldwide. Both industrialized and non-industrialized countries are bearing the burden of repeated floods, droughts, temperature extremes and storms,” WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in an accompanying media release.

“Improved early warning systems and disaster management are helping to prevent loss of life. But the socio-economic impact of disasters is escalating because of their increasing frequency and severity and the growing vulnerability of human societies.”

Written to help decision-makers better understand the disasters and efficiently plan for future similar events, the atlas found that the 10 costliest catastrophes accounted for 19% or $444 billion of overall economic losses.

“Storms and floods accounted for 79% of the total number of disasters due to weather, water and climate extremes and caused 54% of the deaths and 84% of economic losses,” the atlas said. “Droughts caused 35% of deaths, mainly due to the severe African droughts of 1975, 1983 and 1984.”

Ranking disasters according to the numbers of deaths, the atlas found that a 1983 drought in Ethiopia and a 1970 tropical cyclone in Bangladesh each killed 300,000 people, making them the most lethal weather-related events in the past 40 years.

In terms of economic losses by disaster types, hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the most expensive, costing $147 billion. Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, was the second most expensive storm, costing $50 billion.

The media release also noted the UN’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2013 concluded that direct and indirect losses from natural hazards of all kinds have been underestimated by at least 50% because of data collection challenges.

“Another challenge for users of risk information is the changing characteristics (frequency, location, severity) of weather-, climate- and water-related hazards,” the release added. “Natural climate variability is now exacerbated by long-term, human-induced climate change, so that yesterday’s norms will not be the same as tomorrow’s.”

Streams of methane bubbles are percolating along the Atlantic coast between North Carolina’s Outer Banks and Massachusetts’ Cape Cod.

According to the journal Nature, surges of bubbles are flowing from hundreds of ocean-floor leaks. Researchers say the plumes likely contain methane and could add as much as 90 tons of methane—a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide — to the atmosphere each year. The methane bubbles may also hasten ocean acidification.

In the Geoscience newsletter published by Nature, researchers say that some two-thirds of the methane emissions come from methane-rich ices deep in the ocean that may be decomposing due to warming waters along the ocean floor. What effect these emissions will have on the atmosphere or the chemical makeup of the ocean is not immediately clear, but scientists are concerned. 

The bubbles first came into view on sonar scans of the ocean floor during oceanographic expeditions between 2011 and 2013. The expeditions ranged from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina to Georges Bank off Cape Cod and covered more than 36,000 square miles, an area about the size of Indiana. The scanned area includes the margin of the continental shelf and the sloping areas seaward and to the east.

Within a distance of about 590 miles, researchers found some 570 bubble plumes, which is considered to be an extraordinary amount. Previously, researchers studying the area had only detected an incidental number of bubble plumes. While some of the plumes extended far from the ocean floor, most of the bubbles dissolved into the water before they could reach the water’s surface.

The next step for the oceanographic researchers is to collect samples of the bubbles, says Carolyn Ruppel, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey at the Woods Hole, Massachusetts field center and a co-author of the study.

Ruppel found that the plumes contain methane by examining their sources. She says some of the plumes are coming from shallow ocean areas that were once methane-producing wetlands during the last Ice Age. During that period, sea levels were much lower than they are today.

Still, Ruppel notes that many of the seeps producing methane lie along the continental slope at cold depths. Ices there have formed in sea floor sediments under high pressure. These ices, which appear to be melting, hold methane produced by microbes that once lived on the ocean floor. It is surmised that warming ocean waters are now causing the ices to melt. Methane leaks aren’t typically found along continental shelves. The largest sources of methane in the oceans are known reservoirs near active tectonic regions.

Methane can react with oxygen in the water to create carbon dioxide, which in turn, can add to the acidification of ocean waters. Such acidification occurs when pH levels fall in the ocean. The lower the pH, the higher the acid. So falling pH levels in the ocean means that acid is increasing, which has major impacts for species that live in the sea, particularly animals that build calcium-based shells.

The observed increase of carbon-dioxide concentrations in our oceans is considered unparalleled in the Earth's history over the past 20 million years. Scientists are uncertain of the extent marine fauna can adapt to it over extended time periods.

“Studies have shown that a more acidic environment has a dramatic effect on some calcifying species, including oysters, clams, sea urchins, shallow water corals, deep sea corals, and calcareous plankton,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states. "When shelled organisms are at risk, the entire food web may also be at risk. Today, more than a billion people worldwide rely on food from the ocean as their primary source of protein. Many jobs and economies in the U.S. and around the world depend on the fish and shellfish in our oceans.”

While 90 tons may seem like an alarming figure, it’s still much smaller than the amount created by industry, agriculture and other known sources. However, researchers caution that there are far more than 570 of these plumes in our oceans, estimating that there could be 30,000 or more active methane plumes.

Cliff Weathers is a senior editor at AlterNet, covering environmental and consumer issues. He is a former deputy editor at Consumer Reports. His work has also appeared in Salon, Car and Driver, Playboy, and Detroit Monthly among other publications. Follow him on Twitter @cliffweathers and on Facebook.

The politics of climate change are shifting. After decades of halfhearted government efforts to stop global warming, and the failure of the “Big Green” NGOs to do much of anything about it, new voices — and new strategies — have taken the lead in the war against fossil fuels.

Jeremy Brecher, a freelance writer, historian, organizer and radio host based in Connecticut, has documented the environmental movement’s turn toward direct action and grass-roots activism. A scholar of American workers’ movements and author of the acclaimed labor history “Strike!,” Brecher argues that it’s time for green activists to address the social and economic impacts of climate change and for unions to start taking global warming seriously.

His latest book, “Climate Insurgency: A Strategy Against Doom,” which will be released early next year by Paradigm Publishers, examines the structural causes of our climate conundrum and calls for a “global nonviolent constitutional insurgency” to force environmental action from below. Brecher spoke to Salon about his vision for dealing with global warming, the changing face of environmental activism, and why he thinks the People’s Climate March in New York on Sep. 21 is so important.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

First, let’s unpack the book’s key term: What is a “global nonviolent constitutional insurgency”?

Around the world, we’re familiar with insurgencies where an armed group resists the government and says that it does not legitimately have the authority to make law and govern some area or some group of people. And the characteristic of an insurgency is that it denies the legitimacy or legal right of those who claim to be the legitimate authorities to rule.

The concept of nonviolent insurgency is of a kind of social movement where the same basic claim is made: that those who claim the right to rule actually don’t have the right to rule, but where the means of challenging their power is not an armed insurgency but is rather what’s come to be called “people’s power,” or mass civil disobedience or civil resistance. And so a nonviolent insurgency may sound paradoxical, but in fact it is quite a common thing around the world and happens a lot and has happened a lot in the past.

Now, “constitutional” insurgency: That also sounds paradoxical. But when you look historically at certain social movements, they make a claim that the existing rulers are not legitimate because they are violating fundamental aspects of their own constitution  — that is, the constitution that they claim gives them legitimate rule. And that’s come to be known [by legal historian James Gray Pope and others as] a “constitutional insurgency.” It denies the legitimacy of those who claim to be legitimate rulers, but it does so in the name of the very constitutional principle that they claim gives them their authority.

Some notable examples would be Gandhi’s Great Salt March and in general the Gandhian insurgency in India, where they violated English rule and said that it was legitimate to do so because they were representing the underlying principles of English constitutional law. The civil rights movement did not call itself a constitutional insurgency but if you look, say, at the movement in the South, essentially the participants engaged in civil disobedience said that they were upholding the law, that they were representing the fundamental constitutional principles of equality and justice.

So that’s a long way around to saying that if the president of the United States authorizes the Keystone XL Pipeline to be built, he is claiming that he is acting under legitimate authority. I would say he’s not acting under legitimate authority, he’s violating a fundamental constitutional duty of the president of the United States and the United States government: to protect the common property of the people that’s represented by the atmosphere.

[Finally,] climate change is a “global” problem, obviously, and we know that the solutions have to be global. If some countries protect the climate and all the corporations run away to the countries that are not protecting the climate, we won’t have any climate protection. We’ll just have a shift in where the greenhouse gases that are destroying our planet come from. So ultimately it has to be a global solution.

In your book, you speak a lot about the “public trust doctrine” as motivating force for such a solution. What is the doctrine, and why do you think it’s important for the climate movement?

The public trust doctrine is a fundamental principle of American law. It’s explicit in many state constitutions, [although] not all of them. It’s a principle of constitutional law at the state level and at the federal level. What the public trust doctrine in its various forms says is that certain aspects of the world are so important, we all depend on them so much, and they are so inappropriate to be private property, that they are universal common property. They belong to all, no one has the right to exclude others from them, no one has the right to destroy them; as they say legally: to “waste” them or “lay waste” to them.” They are a common property of all people.

The other critical point about the public trust doctrine is that the governments are the trustees for the people, both the current populations and for posterity. What is a trust duty? That’s when one person or one institution holds property in the interest of another, and they have a responsibility to protect the interests of the other. In fact, they have what’s called a “fiduciary” duty, and that means that it is the highest level of duty, that they have a duty to pay no attention to their own personal interests and no attention to the interests of some third party that might like to have the use of those trust assets — they have to act entirely in the interests of the beneficiary owners of that trust.

This is actually a relatively new idea. It was developed primarily by Mary Christina Wood, a law professor at University of Oregon. But it has taken legs to a great extent primarily because of the credible threat posed by climate change and the failure of other government institutions to address it. All the attempts to apply those to climate change have so far not succeeded. So the idea of using the public trust doctrine was taken up as another possible route to deal with this overwhelmingly desperate problem for which there seems to be a dearth of ways — especially law-based ways — to deal with.

You’re a historian of labor and social movements, and your book looks at bridging the divide between environmentalists and workers’ rights campaigns. Why have those two strands of social movements been so distant from each other and why do you have hope that now that gap can be bridged? 

The first thing to be aware of is that there has been a massive effort by those who want to go on polluting to play labor and environmental groups off against each other.

Let’s take the example of the Keystone Pipeline. The Keystone Pipeline has pitted a number of unions against the people who want to prevent the pipeline and it’s been a very, very divisive issue. That situation started when the pipeline companies did something that they don’t normally do: they went to four unions and said, “Hey, we’ll give you a labor contract agreement giving you preference on the jobs for the pipeline and we’ll just agree to that.” They don’t normally agree to that, these are normally anti-union companies. But they knew that if they did that, then when people attacked the Keystone Pipeline it wouldn’t just be the companies standing to make money out of their greedy efforts to do things that are going to be incredibly harmful to the people and the environment, it’s workers who desperately need jobs and who are looked at as the backbone of the nation and people who have been the victims of the Great Recession — they are the ones who are put into the role of being the spokespeople and the advocates for the KXL pipeline.  Same story happens when there are moves to regulate coal-powered power plants. The companies deliberately create a situation where unions become the spokespeople for pollution, on the grounds that preventing pouring this crap into the atmosphere is going to lead to the loss of jobs. So that is a fundamental part of the story of why it has happened.

The second reason is that unfortunately our society allows workers who haven’t done anything wrong, who just happened to be producing something that we’ve decided is not good to produce, we allow them to be thrown on the scrap heap. We allow them to be the victims of the policies that we adopt for protection of society as a whole. This means that people who are threatened with, say, closing the coal-fired power plant, they’re likely to spend years without finding another job. Their communities are going to be devastated because a large part of their working population is going to be unable to find another job, and when they do it’s likely to be a job that pays half as much as before. Their families are devastated. Many people are forced to migrate and leave to find jobs elsewhere. And we tolerate that as a society. It’s an outrage. A central part of what’s needed to counter this is what is called a plan for a just transition. Something that provides for the livelihood and well-being for the people who lose their jobs when it’s necessary to, for example, shut down a coal-fired power plant. 

You provide a pretty comprehensive and broad view for what the constitutional climate insurgency could force governments to do to finally start toppling global warming. What are the most important steps we can take immediately?

The first thing that is right on our radar screens right now is the People’s Climate March in New York in September. I think the very name of it is significant because it says this is not something for governments. You know there was a saying, “War is too important to be left to the generals.” I think this is a message that “Climate change is too important to be left to the politicians and business leaders.” The people who are being affected by it, the people who are now or soon to be the victims of it, can’t leave this to anyone else to look after: We have to look after it. It think that is actually the spirit that will animate and will lead to the kind of climate insurgency that I talk about.

The other thing [about the march] is that it’s tremendously varied in who’s participating in it. People have an image of bird-watching, polar bear-fancying environmentalists. This is a very different kettle of folks. I’d say it’s environmentalists in that, if you are against having our world destroyed by climate change, if you’re against environmental degradation from having your food and your water poisoned by the crap that’s being put in it, you’re an environmentalist. In that sense, everyone in this march is an environmentalist. But in Connecticut where I live and I’ve been working on the march, we actually have a coalition that includes a whole slew of unions, it involves wide participation of religious organizations, community groups, as well as what are known as environmental organizations, and it’s really a people’s movement, not an environmental movement. And I know that similar things are happening in other places.

To me, that’s a great next step. I personally think that the growth of the use of direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience has been a very important development in the climate protection movement.  So that’s the next stage. As that develops, an important piece of this will be to begin to identify what we’re doing when we commence civil disobedience or even just when we have a demonstration or an action or whatever we do — that this is necessary because the government is not meeting its constitutional obligations and we are demanding that it do so, and as part of that, we’re recognizing they’re not, therefore we do not accept their legitimacy. If they want our allegiance, they have to provide the protection that we need and that they have an obligation to provide. So I see mass movements and civil disobedience very naturally flowing into the idea of a climate insurgency.

On September 21, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to march in New York and other cities across the globe to pressure world leaders to take more aggressive action on global warming. The organizers of the People's Climate March believe it will be one of the biggest social-change marches in history. 

The march precedes a United Nations Climate Summit — a meeting of world leaders in New York — by two days. Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary General has said he hopes the summit will inject momentum in reaching a global deal on greatly reducing greenhousegas emissions by the end of 2015, when leaders will convene again in Paris.

Organizers think the demonstration will send a message to the assembled world powers that swift and dynamic action must be taken (China and India will not be represented).

But not everyone in the enviornmental and progressive movement thinks the organized march is the best way to create the needed social change. Chris Hedges, the activist journalist who writes for the news website Truthdig, likens the rally, which will be nowhere near the United Nations building, to a big “climate-change street fair” and laments that anyone can join. This means organizations such as the Climate Group and the Environmental Defense Fund, which include chemical, banking and oil interests among their members and supporters, will be represented at the march.

“These faux environmental organizations are designed to neutralize resistance,” says Hedges. “And their presence exposes the march’s failure to adopt a meaningful agenda or pose a genuine threat to power.”

Hedges hopes the real march comes later, after the organized march is disbanded, and it won’t be limited to a designated demonstration area far from the U.N. Hedges anticipates that more radical social-change organizations will descend on New York to take more significant direct action.

Bill McKibben, the environmental writer and founder of 350.org, an environmental organization that raises awareness about the risks of climate change, says the Climate March is "the only way we’ll change any of these equations, here or elsewhere.”

McKibben argues that an organized and diverse populist movement is the best way to demonstrate that there’s a growing consensus against man-made climate change.

McKibben joined Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! late last month to talk about climate change and to promote the Climate March, of which 350.org is a core sponsor. Below are ​​excerpts from the interview. Following th​e ​transcript is Chris Hedges​'​ retort, a column he wrote on August 31, in which he argues that climate activists need to take more aggressive actions. 

Democracy Now!August 28, 2014 transcript

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the latest U.N. report and then what President Obama, at least according to The New York Times in this major front-page piece, is planning to do?

BILL McKIBBEN: Sure. The new U.N. report is more of the same. In a sense, it’s the scientific community, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, telling us what they’ve been telling us now for two decades, that global warming is out of control and the biggest threat that human beings have ever faced. They’re using what was described as blunter, more forceful language.

At this point, you know, short of self-immolation in Times Square, there’s really not much more that the scientific community could be doing to warn us. Our early warning systems have functioned, you know? The alarm has gone off. All our satellites and sensors and supercomputers have produced the information that we need to know. The question is: Will we act on it?

And the answer so far is no. It’s been no in Congress, that’s for sure. Nothing is going to move through Congress, and there’s no hope of a treaty that would get ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. That’s the complication at the moment in international negotiations. We can’t reach any kind of binding treaty. Everyone’s known this. The Times story about the new Obama approach is pretty much old news. Everybody’s known for years that there’s not going to be a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate. And everyone’s been looking for some kind of workaround.

The workaround would involve some kind of different, voluntary commitments by different countries, but done publicly so one could keep track of them. If this all sounds a little dubious to you, it will sound even more dubious to all the countries that are, you know, watching themselves disappear beneath the waves, so on and so forth, as global warming accelerates. The real question, though, is less the form of the agreement than the content. And here’s where we’ll find out, in the next few months, whether the Obama administration is actually serious or not.

If we’re going to do anything about the problem on the scale that the scientists describe it, then we’re going to need far, far more ambitious attempts than the Obama administration has put forward so far. Yes, they’ve put a cap on coal-fired power plants. That’s good. At the same time, they’ve helped expedite the rise of the United States to become the biggest coal and gas producer in the world, passing the Saudis and the Russians, and they’ve watched coal exports steadily grow. That’s not compatible with what the scientists tell us, that we need to keep 75 or 80 percent of the fossil fuel that we know about underground. So the Obama administration, which likes to poke fun at recalcitrant congressmen, hasn’t been willing to really endure much in the way of political pain itself in order to slow things down. The rest of the world can see that.

The only way we’ll change any of these equations, here or elsewhere, is by building a big movement. That’s why September 21st in New York, which all these groups are coordinating, is such an important day.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:[G]iven the stark nature of this latest report, talking about a 3.6-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperatures by 2050, as much as 6.7 degrees by the end of the century, do you see any—and that’s given the continued greenhouse gas emissions rates now—do you see any hope anywhere in the world for, in one particular nation or other, where the people have managed to get their governments to tackle this problem?

BILL McKIBBEN: Absolutely. Look, the thing that’s changed in the 25 years since I wrote the first book about all this was that we now know that the answers are technologically available. As I said, the Germans have done a fantastic job of deploying renewable energy. But it’s not because Germany has so much wind and so much sun. I mean, in fact, it’s at a far northern latitude. Munich is north of Montreal. It’s because, instead, they have the more important natural resource of political will.

The good news is, political will is something we can create. And that’s why we’ll all be in the streets of New York on September 21st. That’s going to be an amazing day. That march is going to be led by environmental justice advocates, especially from New York City, but from around the country and around the world, the people who are on the front lines of this fight and have borne the brunt of it. It will be joined by the entire progressive spectrum, including, really for the first time, the labor movement in a big way. It’s an attempt to show that there’s powerful demand for change around climate.

If people out there have long thought to themselves, "I wish I could do something about global warming, but it seems so overwhelming. What can one individual do?" in one sense, that’s true. Changing your light bulb isn’t going to do it at this point. But changing the system still could. And that means that your body is badly needed in the streets of New York on September 21st for a peaceful, festive, but ultimately very powerful demonstration of political will.

AMY GOODMAN: And the student movement around the country to have their universities and colleges divest from oil companies, Yale just became the latest, joining with Harvard and Brown, to say no to divestment; of course, others have said yes. What is your assessment of that movement?

BILL McKIBBEN: So, Oxford University, in a study last year, said that it’s the fastest-growing such movement in history. We’re way ahead of where we thought we would be. Yeah, the Ivy Leagues are so far not divesting, but they will. It took them eight or nine years when the subject was apartheid in South Africa. Others are going at a blistering pace. The World Council of Churches, representing 580 million Christians, this summer, there’s now a drive underway—you can find out about it at 350.org—to persuade Pope Francis to have the Vatican divest. A big Roman Catholic research university, University of Dayton in Ohio, divested this summer. Yesterday, Sydney University in Australia, center of the Australian establishment in the biggest coal nation on Earth, announced that it was divesting from coal.

This is an exciting fight. And the point is the point we’ve been making in it, that there’s—that the fossil fuel industry has four times as much carbon as we could possibly burn. It’s no longer just a point that I’m making in Rolling Stone or that university students are making. Now the World Bank is making it, now the International Energy Agency and, on Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Everybody’s doing that math. It’s only a matter of time before people at universities and other institutions begin to do it, too. I think we’ll see some powerful announcements about divestment out of the United Nations summit right after the big march on the 21st.

The Last Gasp of Climate Change Liberals

by Chris Hedges, Truthdig

The climate change march in New York on Sept. 21, expected to draw as many as 200,000 people, is one of the last gasps of conventional liberalism’s response to the climate crisis. It will take place two days before the actual gathering of world leaders in New York called by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to discuss the November 2015 U.N. Climate Conference in Paris. The marchers will dutifully follow the route laid down by the New York City police. They will leave Columbus Circle, on West 59th Street and Eighth Avenue, at 11:30am on a Sunday and conclude on 11th Avenue between West 34th and 38th streets. No one will reach the United Nations, which is located on the other side of Manhattan, on the East River beyond First Avenue—at least legally. There will be no speeches. There is no list of demands. It will be a climate-themed street fair.

The march, because its demands are amorphous, can be joined by anyone. This is intentional. But as activist Anne Petermann has pointed out, this also means some of the groups backing the march are little more than corporate fronts. The Climate Group, for example, which endorses the march, includes among its members and sponsors BP, China Mobile, Dow Chemical Co., Duke Energy, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Greenstone. The Environmental Defense Fund, which says it “work[s] with companies rather than against them” and which is calling on its members to join the march, has funding from the oil and gas industry and supports fracking as a form of alternative energy. These faux environmental organizations are designed to neutralize resistance. And their presence exposes the march’s failure to adopt a meaningful agenda or pose a genuine threat to power.

Our only hope comes from radical groups descending on New York to carry out direct action, including Global Climate Convergence and Popular Resistance. March if you want. But it should be the warmup. The real fight will come once people disperse on 11th Avenue.

“The march is symbolic,” said Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance when I reached him by phone, “but we are past the time of symbolism. What we need is direct action against the United Nations during the meeting. This should include blockades and disruption of the meeting itself. We need to highlight the fact that the United Nations has sold out to corporate interests. At U.N. meetings on climate change you see corporate logos on display. During the last meeting on climate change in Poland, the U.N. held a simultaneous conference to promote coal as a clean energy source. These U.N. meetings have become corporate trade shows where discussions on climate are hijacked to promote corporate interests. Barack Obama has announced he will continue the U.S. stance of only calling for voluntary climate goals in advance of the upcoming climate summit in Paris next year.”

The fossil fuel industry and corporations, from ExxonMobil to Koch Industries, underwrite political campaigns and author our legislation. They have stacked the courts with their judges and the airwaves with their apologists. They fund our scientific research and have effectively silenced dissidents. This corporate reach extends to the United Nations. Companies set up exhibition halls at U.N. climate summits promoting various corporate schemes to profit from the climate crisis, from “clean” coal and biofuel to nuclear power and carbon trading. Those who attempt to offer a counter narrative, especially after the disruptions at the climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, are swiftly silenced by U.N. security. Fences and security barriers now ring heavily guarded U.N. climate conferences. Protesters are herded into police-controlled “free speech” zones outside—like the march in New York—and ruthlessly dealt with if they deviate from the approved routes or make their voices heard among the delegates. The U.N. security at climate summits, which includes physically removing journalists so they cannot photograph or document protests that are shut down by force, is so absolute that the U.N. demands preapproved wording for T-shirts worn at its gatherings. The elites, whether in Congress or attending U.N. summits, have no intention of cutting off their access to wealth, power and privilege. They know where the money is. They know what they have to do to get it. And we are not part of the equation.

Our democracy is an elaborate public relations charade. And the longer we accept this charade the longer we will be irrelevant. Only when we understand power can we fight it. This fight must be waged on two fronts. We must disrupt the machinery of corporate capitalism and at the same time build parallel, autonomous structures for self-governance that address basic needs such as food and green energy. Capitalism, as Karl Marx pointed out, is not merely a system of economic exploitation. It justifies itself by hijacking the ruling political and economic ideologies—ideologies that buttress capitalism’s ceaseless expansion and commodification of the natural world and human beings. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” And this makes our struggle a battle for ideas as well as a battle for power.

This is not a battle I would have picked. I prefer incremental and piecemeal reform. I prefer a system in which we can elect politicians to represent the governed and thwart corporate abuse. I prefer a United Nations that serves the interests of people around the globe rather than corporate profit. I prefer a vigorous and free debate in the public arena. I prefer a judiciary that is not a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state. I prefer the freedom to express dissent without government monitoring of my communications and control of my movements. I prefer to have my basic civil liberties protected. But we do not live in such a system.

The corporate state’s response to climate change has been to pass a series of Draconian laws and set up a vast security and surveillance apparatus that obliterates our privacy, allows us to be snatched off the streets by the military and held without due process in indefinite detention, and criminalizes dissent. The corporate state holds in its hands the legal and physical tools to shut us down. Its response to climate change is not to alter course, but to silence any who resist.

Joe Sacco and I spent two years writing Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. We wrote the book out of the nation’s most impoverished sacrifice zones, places such as Indian reservations, abandoned manufacturing centers, the coalfields of southern West Virginia and the nation’s produce fields. Corporate capitalism holds total, unchallenged power in these sacrifice zones. The politicians, the judges, the press, even the boards of education bow before the dictates of corporate power. And in these sacrifice zones activists have learned something many Americans have yet to understand—corporations are willing to poison Earth and all of its inhabitants for profit. There are no limits.

The collapse of the ecosystem in sacrifice zones brings with it despair, joblessness, high cancer rates, the loss of hope and increased state repression. Those trapped in these sacrifice zones often retreat into drugs and alcohol, the only way for many to blunt the pain. They believe they have no agency. And this misery and despair serve the ends of corporate power. As the environment devolves, the planet becomes one vast sacrifice zone. Joe and I wrote the book as a warning.

The New York Times published a story based on a draft of a new report from the U.N. ’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that speaks of climate change with uncharacteristic bluntness and alarm. The article reads in part:

Runaway growth on the emission of greenhouse gases is swamping all political efforts to deal with the problem, raising the risk of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts” over the coming decades, according to a draft of a major new United Nations report.

Global warming is already cutting grain production by several percentage points, the report found, and that could grow much worse if emissions continue unchecked. Higher seas, devastating heat waves, torrential rain and other climate extremes are also being felt around the world as a result of human emissions, the draft report said, and those problems are likely to intensify unless the gases are brought under control.

The world may already be nearing a temperature at which the loss of the vast ice sheet covering Greenland would become inevitable, the report said. The actual melting would then take centuries, but it would be unstoppable and could result in a sea level rise of 23 feet, with additional increases from other sources like melting Antarctic ice, potentially flooding the world’s major cities.

We have known about the deleterious effects of carbon emissions for decades. The first IPCC report was published in 1990. Yet since the beginning of the Kyoto Protocol Era in the late 1980s, we have emitted as much carbon dioxide as was emitted in the prior 236 years. The rising carbon emissions and the extraction of tar sands—and since the industry has figured out how to transport tar sands without building the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, this delivery seems assured—will continue no matter how many police-approved marches are held. Play by the rules and we lose.

Resistance will come from those willing to breach police barricades. Resistance will mean jail time and direct confrontation. Resistance will mean physically disrupting the corporate machinery. Resistance will mean severing ourselves from the dominant culture to build small, self-sustaining communities. This resistance will be effective only when we refuse to do what we are told, when we turn from a liberal agenda of reform to embrace a radical agenda of revolt.  

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports that the amounts of atmospheric greenhouse gases reached a new high in 2013, driven by rapidly rising levels of carbon dioxide.

The news is consistent with trends in fossil fuel consumption. But what comes as more of a surprise is the WMO’s revelation that the current rate of ocean acidification, which greenhouse gases (GHGs) help to cause, appears unprecedented in at least the last 300 million years.

The details of growing GHG levels are in the annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, published by the WMO—the United Nations specialist agency that plays a leading role in international efforts to monitor and protect the environment.

They show that between 1990 and 2013 there was a 34 percent increase in radiative forcing—the warming effect on our climate—because of long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide.

Complex interactions

The Bulletin reports on atmospheric concentrations—not emissions—of greenhouse gases. Emissions are what go into the atmosphere, while concentrations are what stay there after the complex system of interactions between the atmosphere, biosphere (the entire global ecological system) and the oceans.

About a quarter of total emissions are taken up by the oceans and another quarter by the biosphere, cutting levels of atmospheric CO2.

In 2013, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 142 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution started, in about 1750. Concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide had risen by 253 percent and 121 percent respectively.

The observations from WMO’s Global Atmosphere Watch network showed that CO2 levels increased more from 2012 to 2013 than during any other year since 1984. Scientists think this may be related to reduced CO2 absorption by the Earth’s biosphere, as well as by the steady increase in emissions.

Although the oceans lessen the increase in CO2 that would otherwise happen in the atmosphere, they do so at a price to marine life and to fishing communities—and also to tourism. The Bulletin says the oceans appear to be acidifying faster than at any time in at least the last 300 million years.

“We know without any doubt that our climate is changing and our weather is becoming more extreme due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels,” said the WMO’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud.

Running out of time

“The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin shows that, far from falling, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually increased last year at the fastest rate for nearly 30 years. We are running out of time. The laws of physics are non-negotiable.

“The Bulletin provides a scientific base for decision-making. We have the knowledge and we have the tools for action to try to keep temperature increases within 2°C to give our planet a chance and to give our children and grandchildren a future. Pleading ignorance can no longer be an excuse for not acting.”

Wendy Watson-Wright, executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, said: “It is high time the ocean, as the primary driver of the planet’s climate and attenuator of climate change, becomes a central part of climate change discussions.

“If global warming is not a strong enough reason to cut CO2 emissions, ocean acidification should be, since its effects are already being felt and will increase for many decades to come.”

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 396.0 parts per million (ppm) in 2013. At the current rate of increase, the global annual average concentration is set to cross the symbolic 400 ppm threshold within the next two years.

More potent

Methane, in the short term, is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2—34 times more potent over a century, but 84 times more over 20 years.

Atmospheric methane reached a new high of about 1,824 parts per billion (ppb) in 2013, because of increased emissions from human sources. Since 2007, it has started increasing again, after a temporary period of levelling-off.

Nitrous oxide’s atmospheric concentration in 2013 was about 325.9 ppb. Its impact on climate, over a century, is 298 times greater than equal emissions of CO2. It also plays an important role in the destruction of the ozone layer that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet solar radiation.

The oceans currently absorb a quarter of anthropogenic CO2 emissions—about 4kg of CO2 per day per person. Acidification will continue to accelerate at least until mid-century, according to projections from Earth system models.

Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT.