OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #196, SEPTEMBER 16, 2024.  Compiled by Dick Bennett

ASPECTS—CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES--OF THE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE, CLIMATE CHAOS, NAMING THE CRIMINALS, GOING TO COURT
Listen to Marine Sponges: It’s Possibly Hotter Than Even the IPCC Reported.
Rising Seas, Disruptive Tides, and Risks to Coastal Infrastructure.
Robert Weissman and Public Citizen v. BP and its CEO Mr. Murray Auchincloss.
Resisting Doom.

Controversial Study Says 1.5°C Warming Target Already BreachedBy Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch.  Popular Revolution.org (2-8-24).  A new study using marine sponges collected off the coast of Puerto Rico has found that the planet has already warmed more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Researchers analyzed ocean temperature records from sea sponges going back 300 years, a press release from The University of Western Australia (UWA) said. They concluded that global heating had actually increased by 0.5 degrees Celsius more than earlier estimates. “So rather than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimate of average global temperatures having increased by 1.2 degrees by 2020, temperatures were in fact already 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial levels,” said lead author of the study Malcolm McCulloch, who is a professor with the UWA Oceans Graduate School and Oceans Institute, in the press release. “If current rates of emissions continue, average global temperature will certainly pass 2 degrees by the late 2020s and be more than 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2050.”.. -more-

Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience:  Rising Seas, Disruptive Tides, and Risks to Coastal Infrastructure.   Jun 25, 2024.

Downloads Read online
Climate change is rapidly worsening tidal flooding, threatening essential and costly coastal infrastructure that millions of people depend on.   Research led by the Union of Concerned Scientists shows that between now and 2050, climate change-driven sea level rise will expose more than 1,600 critical buildings and services to disruptive flooding at least twice per year.

This flooding is a particular threat to public and affordable housing—a burden borne inequitably. More than half the infrastructure at risk by 2050 is in communities at a disadvantage based on historical and ongoing racism, discrimination, and pollution.   How much infrastructure will be in jeopardy late this century will depend heavily on the choices countries make about global heat-trapping emissions. Policymakers and public and private decisionmakers must take immediate, science-based steps to safeguard critical infrastructure and achieve coastal resilience.    Read online        
[The partial explanation for inaction so far and probably in the future is given in this report without indicating the author is aware?  --D]

FF COPORATIONS NETTED $BILLIONS LAST YEAR

“Fossil fuel behemoth BP [CEO Mr. Murray Auchincloss] made $13.8 billion in profits last year.”
To put that number in context:
Suppose you make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. (Yes, the federal minimum wage is still stuck where it was 15 years ago.)  You work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. (No vacation for you!)  It would take 915,119 years to earn $13.8 billion. (And that could hardly be considered profits. You would have been scraping by. For almost a million years. Which is about three times longer than human beings have actually existed.). . . .

BP’s new CEO recently admitted that the company intends to focus even more on dirty energy profits after dabbling in renewables. As he bluntly put it, “that’s investing into oil and gas.”

Let’s not forget that BP was behind the worst oil “spill” ever with its Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010. (Seems like a really long time ago, right? Still not as long ago as the last time the federal minimum wage was increased. And this email isn’t even about the minimum wage.)

And, of course, climate chaos— brought about in large part by the myopic greed of multinational corporations like BP — is an existential threat to the Earth and everything that lives on it (including Big Oil CEOs and shareholders).   [Mr. Weissman is a forceful writer able to find the adequate word, and here he opted for understatement.  What would you add to “myopic” to describe a CEO guilty of an existential threat to all life?  disgraceful, reprehensible, lawless, wicked, evil, vile, immoral, amoral, villainous, iniquitous, criminal,gigantic liar and hypocrite, or all of the above?   --Dick]

Some questions for BP’s new CEO, Murray Auchincloss [from Weissman]:
$13.8 billion in profits in one year is not enough? You’re going to further imperil the climate and our very existence by pumping even more fossil fuels out of the Earth and even more carbon pollution into the atmosphere? Why not make your legacy be that of the oil company CEO who had the guts to say enough is enough? Or — since you’ve exposed your greed for all to see — can you at least stop pretending that you care about averting climate chaos and protecting the planet?
Click to add your name now.      -- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen

[PC is one of our greatest public defenders, not surprisingly founded by Ralph Nader.  Weissman/PC tell the truth and organize and finance researchers and lawyers to help us be less complicit with Auchincloss by giving to PC.  –D]

RESISTING DOOM of CONVERGING CATASTROPHES
Naming the Climate Criminals, Showing Their Doublespeak.

CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS NOW.
And our actions should be?  4-15-23

     Dante in “The Inferno” places fence-sitters (one translation) just outside Hell, stung eternally by swarming wasps.   Another translation renders the word opportunists.

     If nuclear weapons and global warming each alone threatens our civilization and together seem sure to end civilized life and most species, shouldn’t we be defiantly, abrasively alert, resisting?   Dante condemned to Hell the adiaphorus and all who claim moral neutrality to cruelty and slaughter, are indifferent to emergencies, would euphemize crisis language.  All who would disseminate effete, flaccid, safe language and public policy. The Mealy-Mouthed Sly Leaders and Parties. 

     Numerous commentators tell us that only a mass movement can reverse our leadership failure.  Yet nonviolently, because the violent haters themselves are destroying civilization and species, some even believing in a cleansing nuclear war to rid the planet of “vermin Putin.”  But believers in the idea of democracy with an awakened majority can remove our irresponsible leaders from office and arrest them. 

       In such a world, in such a world, what the nonviolent peace movement must do is clear.  Remember MLK Jr. ‘s advocacy of nonviolent action.  The language and evidence of truth guides us through darkness.  Now, before the nuclear and warming dangers end us, before we are engulfed by our leaders’ bombs, radioactivity, nuclear winter, scorching temperatures, famines, floods, and drowning and burning cities, we must inflict openness and truth, must name the war and warming mongers, we must   name and shame the perps.   Show their contradictions, their doublespeak. (War Is Peace!). These powerful nonviolent weapons are in our minds and hands.

     Right here in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the University of Arkansas, for example.   Remember the countless outrages and crimes committed by the Bush II administration in manufacturing a war (Bush and his gang never prosecuted).  And then remember our university UAF giving a chief Bush architect of the Iraq War Condoleeza Rice $170,000 to give a speech justifying the War!  This model charlatan and con-woman for peace and justice was celebrated despite her disgracing UAF’s motto: Veritate Duce Progredi, Latin for "To Advance with Truth as (Our) Guide."

     We must renounce, reject, and repel such liars; we must remove them from office, impeach, and if all else fails to rid our body politic of them, arrest them. 

In the IPCC six Assessments of the climate, our scientists understate the little time left unless we get off the fence, or the wasps of a million varieties—warming, overpopulation, a thousand Hiroshimas, ceaseless floods and droughts, hurricanes and forest fires, rising seas--will destroy the entire species that caused the emergency.   –Dick Bennett