122. CLIMATE
MEMO MONDAYS, #122, APRIL 10, 2023
IPCC report on climate calamity. Mronline.
Noam Chomsky on Savage
Capitalism: From Climate Change to
Bank Failures to War
IPCC’s conservative nature masks true scale of action needed to avert
catastrophic climate change
Editor. Mronline.org (4-4-23).
The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change’s (IPCC) synthesis report recently landed with an
authoritative thump, giving voice to hundreds of scientists endeavouring to
understand the unfolding calamity of global heating.
“Savage
Capitalism: From Climate Change to Bank Failures to War. By
Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian
[The following is
excerpted from David Barsamian's recent interview with Noam Chomsky at
AlternativeRadio.org][ [ Brought to us by TomDispatch/TomGram, “Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian,
When Lunatics Run the Asylum.” April 6, 2023.]
David Barsamian: On March 20th, the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report. The new
IPCC assessment from senior scientists warned that there's little time to lose
in tackling the climate crisis. UN
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, "The rate of temperature rise
in the last half-century is the highest in 2,000 years. Concentrations of
carbon dioxide are at their highest in at least 2 million years. The climate
time bomb is ticking." At COP 27 he said, "We are on a highway to
climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator. It is the defining issue
of our age. It is the central challenge of our century." My question to
you is: You'd think survival would be a galvanizing issue, but why isn't there
a greater sense of urgency in addressing it in a substantial way?
Noam Chomsky: It
was a very strong statement by Guterres. I think it could be stronger still.
It's not just the defining issue of this century, but of human history. We are
now, as he says, at a point where we'll decide whether the human experiment on
Earth will continue in any recognizable form. The report was stark and clear.
We're reaching a point where irreversible processes will be set into motion. It
doesn't mean that everybody's going to die tomorrow, but we'll pass tipping
points where nothing more can be done, where it's just decline to disaster.