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