We're Inching Closer to Earth's Deadliest Tipping Points

Tim Radford

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/were-inching-closer-to-earths-deadliest-tipping-points/

Urgent action on climate change will be costly. But inaction could be four or five times more expensive, according to new climate accounting: extremes of global heat are on the increase.

Submarine heatwaves happen three times more often that they did in 1980. Ocean warming events can devastate coral reefs and trigger even more damage from more intense acidification and oxygen loss in the seas, with disastrous consequences for fishery and seafood.

The ecosystems on which all living things – including humans – depend are shifting away from the tropics at up to 40kms a year. Extremes of torrential rainfall, drought and tropical cyclones are becoming measurably more intense.

And all this has happened because global mean surface temperatures have risen in the last century by about 1°C, thanks to ever more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a consequence of profligate use of fossil fuels to drive human expansion.

Forecasts suggest humans could tip the planet to a rise of 1.5°C as early as 2030. This is the limit proposed by 195 nations in Paris in 2015 when they promised to keep global heating to “well below” 2°C by the end of the century.

And now researchers once again warn in the journal Science that even the seemingly small gap between 1.5°C and 2°C could spell a colossal difference in long-term outcomes. Right now, the planet is on track to hit or surpass 3°C by 2100. The case for drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is now more compelling and urgent than ever.

“First, we have under-estimated the sensitivity of natural and human systems to climate change and the speed at which these things are happening. Second, we have under-appreciated the synergistic nature of climate threats – with outcomes tending to be worse than the sum of the parts,” said Ove Hoegh-Goldberg of the University of Queensland in Australia, who led the study.

“This is resulting in rapid and comprehensive climate impacts, with growing damage to people, ecosystems and livelihoods.”

Harder to forecast

And Daniela Jacob, who directs Germany’s Climate Service Centre, added: “We are already in new territory. The ‘novelty’ of the weather is making our ability to forecast and respond to weather-related phenomena very difficult.”

The two scientists were part of a much larger world-wide team of researchers who looked at the risks that arrive with rapid change: damage to forests, farms and wildlife; to coastal communities as sea levels rise and storms multiply.

Their message is clear. There would be huge benefits to containing average global temperature rise to no more than 1.5C above the long-term average for most of human history.

“This is not an academic issue, it is a matter of life and death for people everywhere.” said Michael Taylor, dean of science at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.

Weak commitments

“That said, people from small island states and low-lying countries are in the immediate crosshairs of climate change. I am very concerned about the future for these people.”

So far, the commitments made by most nations are simply too feeble. That risks condemning many nations to chaos and harm, and, as usual, those most vulnerable would be the poorest.

“To avoid this, we must accelerate action and tighten emission reduction targets so that they fall in line with the Paris Agreement. As we show, this is much less costly than suffering the impacts of 2°C or more of climate change,” said Professor Hoegh-Goldberg.

“Tackling climate change is a tall order. However, there is no alternative from the perspective of human well-being − and too much at stake not to act urgently on this issue.”

Greta Thunberg Radically Shifts the Discourse on Climate Change

Juan Cole

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/greta-thunberg-radically-shifts-the-discourse-on-climate-change/

Greta Thunberg, in her speech to the United Nations General Assembly, let them have it. (See below.) Over a century ago, when authoritarian elements in the French officer corps trumped up a treason case against a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, novelist Émile Zola wrote an open letter to the president of the French Republic, which began “I accuse” (j’accuse), in which he named an anti-Semitic major as the culprit behind the miscarriage of justice. Zola changed the terms of discourse about the Dreyfus affair from the question of whether Dreyfus committed treason to the question of who framed him.

Thunberg just changed the discourse about the climate crisis by fingering the culprits.

In mobilizing people for political accomplishments, framing is everything. The 100 corporations that emit most of the world’s suffocating carbon dioxide first tried to frame the crisis as illusory and untrue. Then they argued that the science is disputed. More recently they’ve tried to suggest that emissions are an individual problem and could be solved by individuals becoming vegetarians and such stuff and nonsense as that. The hundred include state-owned Chinese coal companies and in the private sector, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron as the highest-emitting companies, whose profits depend on the burning of fossil fuels. ExxonMobil covered up its own scientists’ findings of rapid global heating and paid for PR campaigns to muddy the waters and allow it to keep profiting from wrecking the planet.

Thunberg isn’t having it. What these corporations and their governmental enablers are doing is a crime. It is a tort, with real live victims. They include everyone who is now, like Ms. Thunberg, 16 years old, since the current corporate carbon dioxide emissions are creating increasing global heating that will rob them of a normal life as we defined normal in the twentieth century. She told them, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

But it isn’t only the future against which an epochal crime is being committed. It is the millions who have already been displaced by drought, wildfires, sea-level rise, storm surges and extreme Hurricanes turbocharged by Frankenstein-like warm oceans. Thunberg took up their cause, too.

Above all, she dismissed the discourse of hope. She demands immediate, practical action. No big vacuum cleaner will be invented to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at an affordable cost. Capturing carbon dioxide and storing it is extremely dangerous, since the gas could kill large numbers of people if it leaked. Individuals skipping a hamburger or going green is not enough. We need governmentally-supplied infrastructure. We need trains and metros. We need electric buses and automobiles. The latter require charging stations. The task can’t be accomplished by individual consumers.

Governments, the representatives of which she was addressing, have been mostly do-nothing. They are accomplices in the crime. They give big monetary subsidies to the biggest polluters, actually paying them to commit the crime.

Ms. Thunberg’s version of “j’accuse” is “How dare you?”

How dare they.

“‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,’ climate activist Greta Thunberg has told world leaders at the 2019 UN climate action summit in New York. In an emotionally charged speech, she accused them of ignoring the science behind the climate crisis, saying: ‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth – how dare you?’”

Transcript of Greta Thunberg's speech

“My message is that we’ll be watching you.




“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!




“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!




“For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.




“You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.




“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.




“Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.




“So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.




“To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.




“How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.




“There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.




“You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.




“We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.




“Thank you.”

BEST REASON TO VOTE FOR BERNIE INSTEAD OF WARREN

SEP 23, 2019

There's No Chance Corporate Elites Will Fix Inequality

Jim Hightower

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/theres-no-chance-corporate-elites-will-fix-inequality/

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of being leery of a fast-talking huckster who visited his home: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” Emerson exclaimed.

Likewise, today’s workaday families should do a mass inventory of their silverware, for the fast-talking CEOs of 181 union-busting, tax-cheating, environment-contaminating, consumer-gouging corporations are asking us to believe that they stand with us in the fight against … well, against them.

From Wall Street banksters to Big Oil polluters, these profiteers are suddenly trumpeting their future intentions to serve not just their own greed, but every “stakeholder” (which is what they call employees, customers, suppliers, et al).

But vague proclamations are cheap, and it’s worth noting that these new champions of the common good propose no specifics — no actual sacrifices by them or benefits for us.

A few media observers have mildly objected, saying it’s “an open question” whether any of the corporate proclaimers will change how they do business. But it’s not an open question at all.  They won’t.

They won’t support full collective bargaining power for workers, won’t join the public’s push to get Medicare for All, won’t stop using monopoly power to squeeze out small competitors and gouge consumers, won’t support measures to stop climate change, and won’t back reforms to get their corrupt corporate money out of our politics.

All told, they won’t embrace any of the big structural changes necessary to reverse the raw economic and political inequality that has enthroned their plutocratic rule.

In fact, their empty proclamation is what West Texas cowboys might call “bovine excrement,” meant to fend off the actual changes that real reformers are advancing. Corporate elites won’t fix inequality for us — they’re the ones doing it to us.

The right-wing takeover of the federal courts

The most destructive and lasting legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency is barely getting covered by the corporate media: the right-wing takeover of the federal courts.

A whopping 150+ judges nominated by Donald Trump have been confirmed by Mitch McConnell to lifetime seats, where for decades they will be able to green-light voter suppression, end abortion rights, and block any restrictions on guns.

Now Mitch McConnell is scrambling to ram through as many of these far-right judges as he can before the 2020 election, and Common Dreams is the only independent nonprofit news outlet shining a spotlight on these nominations.

The Supreme Court get lots of press coverage, but the vast majority of cases never reach it. Most are decided by lower courts, which are becoming completely taken over by Trump.

You see, during the Obama administration, Mitch McConnell blocked or delayed dozens of Obama's judicial appointments. Then when Trump was elected, McConnell went to work filling those empty seats with Trump nominees.

Today, nearly 1 in 4 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals was appointed by Trump. And long after Trump is gone, those judges will be there, pushing his far-right agenda.

These are judges who reject the rights of LGBTQ+ persons. They don't believe women should decide when and whether to start families. And a disturbing number don't even support Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down school segregation.

Over the next year, McConnell will scramble to finish the Trump court takeover. But we'll be watching, calling out his most extreme picks—people like Steven Menashi, an open Islamophobe who calls Roe v. Wade "radical.”

Voters have no chance of influencing these nominations unless they know the facts.

"I Don't Think Billionaires Should Exist": Sanders Proposes Wealth Tax to Slash Fortunes of Ultra-Rich

"Enough is enough. We are going to take on the billionaire class, substantially reduce wealth inequality in America, and stop our democracy from turning into a corrupt oligarchy."

Jake Johnson, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/24/i-dont-think-billionaires-should-exist-sanders-proposes-wealth-tax-slash-fortunes

To tackle "outrageous and grotesque and immoral" levels of inequality in the United States, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday proposed a new wealth tax on the richest Americans that economists say would slash the fortunes of billionaires in half over 15 years and raise an estimated $4.35 trillion in revenue during the first decade.

"I don't think that billionaires should exist," Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, told the New York Times in an interview. "This proposal does not eliminate billionaires, but it eliminates a lot of the wealth that billionaires have, and I think that's exactly what we should be doing."

Sanders's "Tax on Extreme Wealth" plan, detailed on the senator's campaign website, would create a one percent tax on wealth between $32 and $50 million, with the rate progressively increasing on richer Americans.

"A progressive wealth tax is the most direct policy tool to curb the growing concentration of wealth in the United States," economists Gabriel Zucman and Emanuel Saez wrote in a letter analyzing Sanders's proposal. "Senator Sanders's very progressive wealth tax on the top 0.1 percent wealthiest Americans is a crucial step in this direction."

Sanders's website outlines the framework of the tax plan:

1 percent tax on wealth from $32 to $50 million;

2 percent on wealth from $50 to $250 million;

3 percent on wealth from $250 to $500 million;

4 percent on wealth from $500 to $1 billion;

5 percent on wealth from $1 billion to $2.5 billion;

6 percent on wealth from $2.5 billion to $5 billion;

7 percent on wealth from $5 billion to $10 billion;

8 percent on wealth over $10 billion.

"At a time when millions of people are working two or three jobs to feed their families, the three wealthiest people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of the American people," Sanders said in a statement. "Enough is enough. We are going to take on the billionaire class, substantially reduce wealth inequality in America, and stop our democracy from turning into a corrupt oligarchy."

To prevent the rich from evading the wealth tax, Sanders's plan would establish a number of oversight and enforcement mechanisms, including:

Creating a national registry and significant additional third-party reporting requirements;

Increasing IRS funding for enforcement and requiring the IRS to perform an audit of 30 percent of wealth tax returns for those in the one percent bracket and a 100 percent audit rate for all billionaires;

Creating a 40 percent exit tax on the net value of all assets under $1 billion and 60 percent over $1 billion for all wealthy individual seeking to expatriate to avoid the tax; and

Making enhancements to the international tax enforcement and anti-money laundering regime, including the strengthening of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

On his website, Sanders said the revenue raised from the wealth tax would be used to fund the senator's other progressive policy proposals, such as Medicare for All and universal childcare.

"Over the last 30 years, the top 1 percent has seen a $21 trillion increase in its wealth, while the bottom half of American society has actually lost $900 billion in wealth," the senator said. "In other words, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from those who have too little to those who have too much."

"For the sake of our democracy and working families all over America who are struggling economically," Sanders added, "that has got to change."

Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, applauded Sanders's wealth tax proposal in a statement Tuesday, calling the plan a "welcome addition to our national tax debate."

"The wealthiest people in this country haven't been paying their fair share for a long time, and part of that problem is because our tax code only taxes the wealthy based on how much income they choose to take each year," said Pearl. "The very rich get money not from earning it each year, but from spending wealth that they have already made."

"If our tax laws only target one without touching the other, then rich folks like me will continue to find ways to game the system and our inequality crisis will continue to get worse," Pearl added. "We are thrilled to see this proposal and look forward to more dialogue on this critical issue moving forward in the debates."

Brazilians Blast Bolsonaro's UN Speech Denying Amazon Devastation as a Total 'Scam'

Critics of his environmental agenda warn that "Bolsonaro's policies bring an immediate risk to all humankind."

Jessica Corbett, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/24/brazilians-blast-bolsonaros-un-speech-denying-amazon-devastation-total-scam

Brazilians and environmental advocates around the world responded with outrage to a speech that Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro gave Tuesday to the United Nations General Assembly that included what one reporter described as "a cantankerous and conspiratorial defense of his environmental record."

Márcio Astrini, public policy coordinator at Greenpeace Brazil, declared Tuesday that "the president's speech about the environment was a scam."

"Bolsonaro is trying to convince the world that he is protecting the Amazon, when in reality he is promoting the dismantlement of the environment," Astrini said. "Under his management, burning, deforestation, and violence have increased outrageously. For the forest and its people, Bolsonaro is a problem, not the solution."

Bolsonaro's first speech (pdf) to the U.N. since he took office in January came amid mounting global criticism over this past summer's surge in deforestation and corresponding fires in the Amazon rainforest, the majority of which is located in Brazil. The ongoing destruction has provoked worldwide protests and calls for international intervention from some environmentalists and other world leaders—notably, French President Emmanuel Macron.

In Bolsonaro's address delivered in Portuguese Tuesday, the Brazilian leader took aim at foreign governments, NGOs, and the international media that have sounded the alarm about the burning of the Amazon.

"First of all, my government is solemnly committed to environmental preservation and sustainable development, to the benefit of Brazil and the world," Bolsonaro claimed, noting that "Brazil is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of biodiversity and mineral resources."

Bolsonaro continued:

All countries have their issues. However, the sensationalist attacks we have suffered from much of the international media due to the Amazon fires have aroused our patriotic sentiment.

It is a misconception to state that the Amazon is a world heritage; and it is a misconception, as scientists attest, to say that our forest is the lung of world. Resorting to these fallacies, some countries, instead of helping, have followed the lies of the media and behaved disrespectfully, with a colonialist spirit.

They have questioned what is most sacred to us: our sovereignty!

The Brazilian president added that he is "especially grateful" to U.S. President Donald Trump for respecting Brazil's sovereignty and claimed that "unfortunately, some people, both inside and outside Brazil, with the support of NGOs, insist on treating and keeping our natives as cavemen." Bolsonaro promised that his government "will not increase its already demarcated Indigenous lands to 20 percent, as some heads of state would like to see happen."

As The Guardian reported Tuesday, "In an attempt to portray himself as a friend of Brazil's Indigenous communities Bolsonaro invited a rare indigenous supporter, Ysani Kalapalo, to attend his address and donned an Indigenous necklace after arriving in New York."

Sônia Guajajara, head of the Brazilian Indigenous People's Association and one of the country's best-known Indigenous leaders, criticized Bolsonaro for the stunt.

"This is an attempt to trick the world and show he has support. But... it is another of his big lies," Guajajara told The Guardian. "It doesn't matter what image he wants to project. What matters are his actions—which the world whole is seeing."

Guajajara addressed Indigenous Brazilians' broader opposition to Bolsonaro's environmental agenda in an interview published Tuesday by The Washington Post.

"He wants to deliver our land for exploration, and we will never abide by this position," she said. "The Indigenous movement across the five regions of this country do not agree with Bolsonaro's politics. We will continue fighting, opposing and making ourselves foes of this government."

Brazil's former Environmental Minister Marina Silva, who oversaw a significant reduction in deforestation in the 2000s, told the Post that "it is unfortunate, worrying, and very sad to see Brazil, which was once a protagonist in the environmental agenda, deny the reality of the grave problem of deforestation."

"Only someone completely deranged and delirious can negate that which the eyes can see," Silva added.

The Brazilian Climate Observatory concurred in a statement Tuesday.

"As expected, Bolsonaro's speech at the United Nations has doubled down on division, on nationalism and on ecocide," the observatory said. "The president has once again embarrassed Brazil abroad by giving up the country's long-standing leadership on the environment for the sake of ideology."

"Bolsonaro's policies bring an immediate risk to all humankind," the observatory warned. "Science warns us that we have until 2030 to cut carbon emissions by 45 percent if we want to have a standing chance of stabilizing global heating at 1.5°C, thus avoiding its worst impacts. Runaway deforestation both in the cerrado and in Amazonia can, alone, blow the global target."

Reporters highlighted factual issues with Bolsonaro's 30-minute address and noted that it could have repercussions for diplomacy. The Guardian's Tom Phillips tweeted, "Even in their worst nightmares, I'm not sure Brazilian diplomats will have imagined a Bolsonaro [U.N. General Assembly] speech so arrogant, so bile-filled, and so truly calamitous for Brazil's place in the world."

As Scottish foreign correspondent Andrew Downie put it, "Well, speeches to the U.N. don't get crazier than that."