Noam Chomsky: 'In a couple of generations, organized human society may not survive.’

The elegant simplicity of his campus office — a small round table with several straight-backed chairs, a laptop on an uncluttered desk — contrasts with his reputation as one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Now aged 90, Noam Chomsky continues to write, and is co-teaching a course on politics and global crises at the University of Arizona.

Noam Chomsky - considering the relationship
between the media and the climate crisis.

Apart from his paradigm-creating work in linguistics, Chomsky has been an outspoken and cogent critic of American foreign policy and its connection with human rights violations and military aggression around the world. With his colleague, the late Ed Herman, Chomsky developed a “propaganda model” of the corporate mass media to help explain the economic and political elite’s ability to maintain ideological legitimacy. A range of “filters” — corporate ownership, advertising dependence, establishment-oriented sourcing practices, flak from right-wing critics, and ideological anti-Communism — cause news media to function as a propaganda system reinforcing elite power.

In recent years, Chomsky has turned his prodigious mind to the existential threat of global warming, a “threat to the perpetuation of organized human life,” on par with nuclear war. Now, in an exclusive interview with National Observer on Jan. 22, Chomsky directly addresses the specific relationship between media and the climate crisis.

Read the story from Canada’s National Observer - “Noam Chomsky: 'In a couple of generations, organized human society may not survive.’'

‘We didn't know exactly what we needed to do': The climate change battle in 1994

The Keating government wrestled with the politics and policies of climate change, not least in terms of how Australia might retain its leverage in international forums where its reputation was slipping through 1994.

A Queensland farmer and his dog stand alongside a dried up dam in November 1994.  

It also dawned on Cabinet that the cost for Australia to meet climate change commitments was far higher than those faced by European and North American nations.

Cabinet was advised in September that the commitments in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change were already proving insufficient to stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations "at a level that would prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system".

Further, international pressure was mounting to strengthen those commitments. Yet even within the formula negotiated to recognise its status as an "emissions-intensive" economy, Australia was "only likely to achieve 46 to 53 percent" of its target by 2000.

Read Damien Murphy’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “‘We didn't know exactly what we needed to do': The climate change battle in 1994.”

The human face of climate change is often hidden

The noise of the melting, crashing glaciers
in Peru adds something of a "human face'.

The human face of climate change rarely shows itself in Australia, at least officially.

Australians, like most others in the world, are becoming normalized to the extreme and different weather that has become a constant companion around the world.

The recent super-cell storm that swept through Brisbane causing damage worth in excess of more than $1 million was described as a “freak storm”.

That, along the simple and definable things such as warmer night’s, which have the finger prints of climate change all over them, are simply morphing into becoming how things are meant to be.

Even though our scientists can clearly define the damage we have caused to earth’s atmosphere, few people are prepared to risk reputation in declaring such events as that in Brisbane as clear evidence of climate change.

Writing in the Age in a story headed: “Annual United Nations climate conference held in Peru, the human face of climate risks” Marcus Priest discusses the human face of climate change in Peru, the venue for next week’s annual United Nations climate conference.

Backward views on climate change impacting on international relationships

Australia’s Coalition Government-driven attitude towards climate change and the mitigation of it is seriously corrupting our standing in the global community.

Today’s Melbourne Age reports in a story headed: “US ties at risk over climate” that our inaction could see us isolated and our reputation damaged.

Reporter Peter Hannam says that a top adviser to the Obama administration has said Australia could jeopardise its relationship with the United States in the Abbott government failed to fall in line on climate policy.