Escaping extinction through paradigm shift

For the last month, as a journalist and academic, I’ve experienced a strange sensation of paralysis.

Drone footage of displaced family tents in one settlement
 in Badghis, Afghanistan, due to ongoing drought and
climate change. There are thousands of makeshift homes
 spread between mountain hills on the outskirt of Qala-i-naw city. 

I don’t usually experience this. Usually I find myself driven by the pressures of wanting to cover with due justice a full spectrum of intersecting crises and potential solutions.

But this month watching the spectacle of political madness unfolding across Washington, London and Brussels, while chaos and suffering continues to kick off across Venezuela, Yemen, Israel-Palestine, Syria, Nigeria and beyond, I experienced something I haven’t felt in a long-time. A sense of total burn-out. Of futility. Of tiredness.

Read the Medium story by Nafeez Ahmed - “Escaping extinction through paradigm shift.”

Paris accord: Syria plans to join climate agreement, leaving US only country opposed

Syria has announced it intends to join the 2015 Paris agreement for slowing climate change, leaving the United States as the only country in the world opposed to the pact.

The UN weather agency says 2017 temperatures
 are set to be the second or third hottest on record.

Syria, wracked by civil war, and Nicaragua were the only two nations outside the 195-nation pact when it was agreed in 2015.

Nicaragua's left-wing Government, which originally denounced the plan as too weak, signed up last month.

"I would like to affirm the Syrian Arab Republic's commitment to the Paris climate change accord," deputy Environment Minister Wadah Katmawi told a meeting of almost 200 countries at the November 6-17 climate talks in Bonn, Germany.

Read the ABC News story - “Paris accord: Syria plans to join climate agreement, leaving US only country opposed.”

Trump’s Stupid and Reckless Climate Decision - Bill McKibben

People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he’ll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear. The latest, most troubling example is his decision to obliterate the Paris climate accord: After nearly 200 years of scientific inquiry and over 20 years of patient diplomacy that united every nation save Syria and Nicaragua, we had this afternoon’s big game-show Rose Garden reveal: Count us out.

A protester at the March for Science in Philadelphia in April.

It’s a stupid and reckless decision — our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization’s chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.

Science first. Since the early 1800s we’ve been slowly but surely figuring out the mystery of how our climate operates — why our planet is warmer than it should be, given its distance from the sun. From Fourier to Foote and Tyndall, from Arrhenius to Revelle and Suess and Keeling, researchers have worked out the role that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases play in regulating temperature. By the 1980s, as supercomputers let us model the climate with ever greater power, we came to understand our possible fate. Those big brains, just in time, gave us the warning we required.

Read the opinion piece by Bill McKiben in The New York Times - “Trump’s Stupid and Reckless Climate Decision.”

Climate change a natonal security issue, geoengineering a disaster

Erratic weather. Draughts. Hurricanes. ISIS.

It seems like one of these things doesn’t belong. And while it’s true that the persistence of terrorist groups in the Middle East is a phenomenon separate from global warming, two new reports and basic logic argue that the U.S. Government needs to start looking at climate change as inextricably linked to U.S. and global security.

Taken together, the reports sound an alarm that is often ignored when politicians in the U.S. talk about their government’s environmental responsibilities. Republicans, for their part, dismiss human-made climate change while often trumpeting the importance of military preparedness. When Democrats talk about global warming, they prefer a narrative that couples economics with sea levels — a green economy will create jobs while slowing the rise of oceans. Both parties tend to ignore the ways in which climate change has led to conflict and the ways in which continued climate change will escalate existing conflicts. And few institutions — political, governmental, civilian, scientific, academic, etc. — have truly grappled with the potential ramifications of what could happen if mankind found itself forced to take drastic measures to stop global conflict and warming at one time.

Syria stands out as a modern example of how a complex matrix of factors, including a historic drought, can create political instability. Does President Bashar al-Assad have impressive popularity ratings in a world without global warming? Probably not, but the civil war in Syria is at least partially about basic resources and the lack thereof has compounded the refugee crisis.

Read the Inverse story - “When Climate Change Is a National Security Issue, Geoengineering Is a Disaster.”

Terrorism and climate change are directly related

First Bernie Sanders said “climate change was directly related to the growth of terrorism.” Then Prince Charles said drought was the root cause of the Syrian conflict and current refugee crisis. Pundits everywhere leaped at the opportunity to say both claims were wrong. Who is right?

We have been studying the possible link between climate and violence for years, and we'd like to clarify what the most up-to-date science can and cannot say on this topic.

“We can't predict that a particular conflict will or will not happen. Instead, we can assess the risk that violence might occur in response to changes in the climate.”

In general, conflicts are complex events — the result of many instigating factors, not just one. When we notice that violence occurs at the same time as a major climatic event, like the war in Syria erupting at the same time as a drought, we don't ask, “Was the climactic event the cause of the conflict?” Rather, we ask “Was the climatic event a cause of the conflict?” It might be that you need both ethnic rivalries and a drought to create a conflict, and missing either key ingredient might lead to a more peaceful outcome.

Read the Los Angeles Times opinion piece - “Climate change is indeed a cause of social conflict.”

Fossil fuel burning was responsible 250 million years ago - Monbiot

I

t now looks as if the greatest mass extinction on Earth – 250 million years ago – was caused by fossil fuel burning, according to Guardian columnist, George Monbiot.

George Monbiot.

In “A Prehistory of Violence” he writes, “ Do you want to know the real reason for the advances by Isis in Iraq and Syria? Changing lightbulbs in America. This is the explanation given by John McCain, Republican chair of the Senate armed services committee.

“At the weekend he blamed Barack Obama’s inability to magic away Islamic State on the president’s belief that climate change is “the biggest enemy we have”. Never mind the role of the Iraq war – which Mr McCain supported – in destabilising the region, destroying the Iraqi army and creating the opportunities Isis has exploited,” Monbiot wrote.

Human conflict and climate change linked by academy

Human conflict as long been thought by many as a naturally evolving from climate change.

And now America’s National Academy of Science has made that link.

In a story headed: “Researchers Link Syrian Conflict to a Drought Made Worse by Climate Change” draws one of the strongest links yet between global warming According to the story, “Researchers said Monday that an extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 was most likely due to climate change, and that the drought was a factor in the violent uprising that began there in 2011.

“The drought was the worst in the country in modern times, and in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists laid the blame for it on a century-long trend toward warmer and drier conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean, rather than on natural climate variability,” it was reported.