From:: New Eastern Outlook
The
deadly and destructive effects of abrupt climate change continue to be
felt across the planet and still the response of national governments is
to do nothing except issue press releases expressing sympathy for the
victims and empty promises of local aid. In India, this week, hundreds
have died in extreme heat, in the southern United States, biblical rains
have ruined the lives of thousands, in California and Brazil drought
threatens entire continental regions. Alaska is experiencing
temperatures 20 degrees Celsius above normal while in southern Ontario,
in Canada, many vineyards suffered the destruction of their entire grape
crop as temperatures suddenly plummeted and rainfall there is half of
normal. It snowed again in Newfoundland and in New Zealand they had
their largest first snowfall in decades.
In the Arctic the high temperature
anomalies are causing large flows of warm, river water into the deltas
that flow into the ocean from Norway to Siberia to the Yukon, warming
the water and thinning the ice, now at its lowest point on record.
Methane releases normally at about 1800ppb are now exceeding 2800ppb and
a methane cloud has spread across the northern hemisphere. The west
Antarctic ice sheet is breaking up, and faster than anyone had predicted
and it and Greenland are releasing 400 billion tons of water into the
oceans every year raising sea levels higher and faster, while world
wide, glaciers have shrunk by 1.2 trillion tons in the past eight years.
Forest and brush fires have caused
destruction from Chile to British Columbia, from Siberia to California
and Australia, and now everyone hopes that the strengthening El Nino
arising in the Pacific will bring enough rain to break the drought and
the danger. For each fire not only destroys what’s in its path it also
releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and so the heating
climate provides its own means of increasing its temperature further;
just one of dozens of feedback loops interacting in ways we cannot hope
to fully understand, except that the combined effect is a planetary
catastrophe.
Just a few months ago, in another
article here, I reported the press conference called by the Arctic
Methane Emergency Group at the meeting of world climate scientists and
politicians in Peru to discuss the extent of climate change and
solutions. None were offered and AMEG warned that if a blue ocean event
happens in the Arctic then the warming in the Arctic would drive the
earth’s weather and ecological systems into chaos. It could happen later
this year. But even in five, the danger is upon us now. As AMEG also
stated, we are in a planetary emergency-the first one ever declared.
They posit that geo-engineering is feasible that could reduce global
warming. Those who think it would not be effective, or even make things
worse criticize their position. The debate continues. Others think, like
Dr. Guy McPherson, and give compelling reasons to support their
thinking, that it is far too late, and no matter what is tried, too many
feedback loops are already in play, and that the certain collapse of
the means of production of food, water and other resources will lead to
the extinction of human kind. There will be no survivors.
Just this week documents came to light
from Shell Oil stating that their scientists are sure the average global
temperature will rise by not even the high 2 degrees governments now
refer to as desirable, but by 4 to 6 degrees, each degree a deadly
bullet into the heart of the ecosystems that allow us to exist. And
where are the urgent meetings, of even enemy governments, to act, where
is the urgent and patriotic hue and cry in the media that exists for the
phony war on “terrorism”.
Governments are supposed to have, as
their first duty, the obligation to ensure the well being of the
citizens to whom they are responsible. Yet in India the poor who suffer
the most have to complain to the press that nothing is done, that the
suffering are on their own, and that men earning 3 dollars a day on a
construction site feel compelled to keep working in 48 degrees Celsius
heat, risking death because otherwise they will starve.
An article on the FirstPost website
in India says the “the heat wave has reached disastrous proportions;
but neither the central government nor the state governments have relief
plans in place”.
“Despite its
predictable, periodic incidence and high levels of mortality,
governments have done precious little to mitigate its impact on people
because obviously they don’t care – it’s still not considered a natural
calamity,” it adds.
The website further
argues that “it’s time to think about heat waves as a natural disaster
and put in place both preventive and mitigatory steps”.
This is the state of the capitalist
world and even the socialist world that is entrapped within its systems.
No one really cares. If they did they would act to help their fellow
man, to take care of us, but there is no response, none, except to say,
“Stay cool.” There is no plan, nor even the sense that anyone has even
begun to think of one. Governments are in the pocket of the financiers,
bankers and industrialists.
They have no legitimacy under the
various constitutions they are sworn to uphold because they manifestly
do not undertake the duties nor shoulder the responsibilities they have
to the people. In the West, the governments act in the interests of
gangsters who are prepared to see people suffer so long as they can make
more profit. They prefer to plant bombs, stir up wars, and frighten the
people with the hobgoblins of “terrorism” in order to obscure reality
from the people.
But in their pretence to be “of the
people and for the people” even gangsters will try to earn some other
respect than that drawn by fear, and will occasionally throw the
peasants something.
It flatters their vanity and gives them
something to talk about at their country clubs and intergovernmental,
intercorporate meetings where no doubt lots of crocodile tears are shed.
And so they sometimes take small actions to appear that they are
responding. But the response is always piecemeal and always in reaction
to a specific event, this flood, that storm, though occasionally, a high
potentate, like President Obama, will even acknowledge that climate
change “is a concern” for the “national security.” But most of the money
is still thrown away on arms and wars generated by the same financiers,
bankers and industrialists.
We are warned that, at the latest, the
earth systems that support human kind will collapse in a century and,
some, such as Guy McPherson, think as soon as 2030-40, only a few years
from now. Either estimate is a flick of eyelid. It will affect everyone.
There will be no survivors if they are right and it looks more and more
compellingly that they are.
Civilization is at a crisis. George
Monbiot recently, in the Guardian, drew attention to the fact that one
factor in the Syrian war is the multi-year drought that has caused
severe problems for the population and the nation and government. We are
seeing similar effects in other regions from Mexico to China, and the
oceans are casting their dead all along our coasts.
Yet,
there is no mechanism by which the peoples of the world can force their
governments to undertake their true obligations and responsibilities.
And we have to face the fact that the peoples of the world have been
successfully divided into nations and sub-nations, their common
brotherhood buried under banners of nationalism and chauvinism, of
“exceptionalism” and atomised into billions of particles all told to
think of only themselves, not the other, and that vanity and ignorance
are virtues, and that to have is better than to be.
Where in the West is the social contract
that Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed united us all in common purpose and
gave legitimacy to government? Where are the ideals of the great
revolutions, the English, the French the great Russian and Chinese
revolutions that succeeded, each one, in further emancipating the
workers, the peasants, the artists, and intellectuals, so they had a
fairer share of the wealth of their nations and more equality and
justice before the law.
But even in the socialist world, though
things are done to try to limit pollution and reduce carbon in the
atmosphere, as we see with China’s tree planting program, and carbon
sequestration initiatives, they are still locked into a predominantly
capitalist, for profit world, there still seems no urgency, and the
leaders talk in terms of decades instead of months.
This begs the question can democracy
really exist in nations of tens of and hundreds of millions of people?
What is this democracy? Here in Canada I am opposed to the new secret
security laws just put in place by the right wing government. I have
never voted for the party in power. Everyone I know opposes these laws.
Yet the laws are in place, so that now a few can arrest the many for
their own interests, and call it “legal”. Is this democracy? They tell
me it is.
So, we are in a very bad situation, but I
don’t see anything being done about it. Civilisation has reached a
point at which its social, economic, and political systems no longer
function, except in a generally destructive way. And still people are
collapsing from the heat in India, or drowning in Texas, while we watch
it, like a cheap TV entertainment, a macabre reality show. But, be
warned. Soon it will be you and me.
==================================================================
Christopher Black is an
international criminal lawyer based in Toronto, he is a member of the
Law Society of Upper Canada and he is known for a number of high-profile
cases involving human rights and war crimes, especially for the online
magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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