Monday, July 4, 2022
Biodiversity Risks To Linger At Least A Half Century After Temperature Peaks
https://popularresistance.org/biodiversity-risks-to-linger-at-least-a-half-century-after-global-temperature-peaks-study-says/
By Tiffany Chaney, EcoWatch.
July 2, 2022
Educate!
Even if global temperatures start to decrease, after peaking this century due to climate change, biodiversity risks are likely to persist for decades, a new study by London’s Global University (UCL) and University of Cape Town researchers finds. The potential impacts on biodiversity were modeled against pre-industrial levels if temperatures increased by more than 2°C (35.6°F), before beginning to fall again.
Climate change and all of its anthropomorphic influences are already facing a biodiversity crisis, with mass dieoffs — such as hundreds of migratory birds falling out of the sky in the Southwest in 2020. Altered reproductive events and species distributions are also among existing ill impacts.
In 2015, the Paris agreement was signed in an attempt to reduce global warming below 2°C. Since greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, many scientific models now analyze decades-long overshoots of this limit. The effects of potential carbon dioxide removal technology were also factored into this model, targeting the offset of harmful temperature increases by 2100.
A Return To Pre-Overshoot ‘Normal’ Is Uncertain At Best
Researchers studied more than 30,000 species in habitats globally and discovered that for a quarter of the areas examined, the chances of reversing the damage to pre-overshoot “normal” are either nonexistent or uncertain.
“We found that huge numbers of animal species will continue to endure unsafe conditions for decades after the global temperature peak,” said co-author Dr. Alex Pigot (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences). “Even if we collectively manage to reverse global warming before species are irreversibly lost from ecosystems, the ecological disruption caused by unsafe temperatures could well persist for an additional half century or more.”
Researchers also looked at the possibility of CO2 emissions continuing to grow until 2040, then dipping after 2070 due to carbon cut efforts and carbon dioxide removal technology deployment. That means for several decades during this century, global temperatures would breach 2°C but fall after 2100. Researchers analyzed how quickly a species in any given location may become exposed to harmful temperatures, how long that would persist, the numbers of species it would affect and whether or not any return to “normal” were possible.
Most Species In Tropical Regions Threatened With Volatile Conditions
For most locations, dangerous temperature exposure will occur suddenly as species are pushed outside their thermal niche limits. Researchers also found that any return to comfortable thermal niches for these species would be gradual, lagging drastically behind global temperature decrease — due to volatile climatic conditions and impacts on ecosystems. The overshoot for biodiversity risks was determined to range from 100 to 130 years, twice longer than the actual temperature overshoot.
Regions facing the most impact include tropical locations for more than 90% of species in the Central Indian Ocean, the Indo-Pacific, Northern Australia and Northern Sub-Saharan Africa, all pushed beyond their thermal niches. In the Amazon, the team found more than half of all species will be exposed to volatile climate conditions. For almost 19% of all locations examined, including the Amazon, uncertainty surrounds the potential of returning to pre-overshoot levels; while 8% of regions may never return to those levels. The globe may likely face irreversible species extinction and ecosystem transformations.
Avoiding Temperature Offshoot Takes Priority
“Our findings are stark,” said co-author Christopher Trisos (African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town). “They should act as a wake-up call that delaying emissions cuts will mean a temperature overshoot that comes at an astronomical cost to nature and humans that unproven negative emission technologies cannot simply reverse.”
Carbon dioxide removal technologies and nature-based solutions, such as afforestation, are also associated with potential negative impacts, shared lead co-author Dr. Joanne Bentley (African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town). Dr. Bentley warned that if the 2°C global warming target is overshot, the loss of biodiversity could compromise the ecosystem services humanity relies on for its livelihood. She advised that avoiding temperature overshoot should be the top priority, then limiting the magnitude and duration of any overshoot.
The research was funded by a collaboration between the African Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society. The paper was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
No, NATO Will Not Get Ready For War
by Moon of Alabama
https://popularresistance.org/no-nato-will-not-get-ready-for-war/
I had a good laugh when I read this nonsense:
NATO to boost troops on high alert to over 300,000 -Stoltenberg
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – NATO will boost the number of troops on high alert by more than sevenfold to over 300,000, its secretary-general said on Monday, as allies prepared to adopt a new strategy describing Moscow as a direct threat four months into the Ukraine war.
The new force model is meant to replace the NRF and “provide a larger pool of high readiness forces across domains, land, sea, air and cyber, which will be pre-assigned to specific plans for the defense of allies,” a NATO official said.
NATO does not have 300,000 troops to put on high alert. The troops are controlled by member states and I see no willingness by any of them to shoulder the costs that a real high alert status would have. Units on high alert means that they fully manned with no one on vacation and with enough supplies ready to sustain weeks of battle. All of that costs money. Member states will instead designate existing units as ‘high alert’ ones and change nothing else in their usual equipment and training.
The statement is pure NATO public relations fluff. Stoltenberg did not even ask or inform member states before he made that announcement:
Stoltenberg’s announcement caught the top defense officials of many NATO members off guard, leading them to question which of their forces, if any, were being included in the 300,000 figure.
“Maybe it’s number magic?” said one senior European defense official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about the confusion.
Several senior European security policymakers said they were taken by surprise, with no advance notice of the plan to expand NATO’s quick-response force from its current size of 40,000 in light of the Ukraine war and Russia’s ongoing military threats to NATO territory.
This was one of the ideas that are typical for NATO bureaucrats who live in their own fantasy world. They are the reason why the French president Macron has called NATO ‘brain dead’. And no, it is really nothing more than an idea:
A NATO official, speaking on the condition of anonymity per the alliance’s ground rules, said that country-specific numbers still needed pinning down. Even the 300,000 total is theoretical for the moment: “The concept has not been fully worked up yet,” the official said. “We will have to do more to build up the model before we can work out what national commitments can be.”
Even so, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht has already said her country will offer up 15,000 troops — a full division.
Lambrecht offered nothing. She will put the fake ‘high alert’ label on an existing division and change nothing else. That she did this is actually quite revealing. If Germany as one of the bigger NATO countries offers only one division size element where will the other 19 division size elements come from that are needed to make up a 300,000 strong force? Do they even exist?
NATO is just a shadow of its former self. Member states now have only a few troops that can be designated to work under NATO. Even those lack ammunition and depot weapons to make up for eventually losses. Some now even lack the industries to make more systems and grenades. They are also unable to make new ones that are fit for their purposes.
Neither of the big or small ‘modern’ weapons that were given to Ukraine has made a difference. The Javelins had empty batteries, the British NLAW anti-tank weapons were too weak to defeat Russian armor. Switchblade suicide drones are not controllable under Russian electronic warfare conditions. Stinger missiles have heat sensors that are too slow to acquire a fast moving target. The ‘light’ howitzer M-777 are too light for real battle conditions and tend to break.
NATO countries have put too much money into their air forces which will be unable to break through Russia’s excellent air defenses. NATO’s air defense is in contrast too weak. Just ask the Saudis how well their Patriot systems worked against Yemeni drones. Those systems can do nothing against Russia’s medium range missiles. System like Iskander and Kalibr, of which Russia has many, are hard to find in NATO armies.
What is the last time NATO units have trained under electronic warfare conditions?
The New York Times interviewed nearly two dozen Ukrainian soldiers over the last several weeks who all pointed to similar problems: Russians jammed their radios constantly; they didn’t have enough communication gear; and they often had difficulty getting through to a commander to call for artillery support. Talking to units stationed nearby was also an issue, they said, which has led to Ukrainian forces occasionally firing on one another.
“They would use the stronger signal on the same frequency,” he said.
Troops in more specialized units have been issued U.S.-supplied encrypted radios and can speak to one another unhindered, one soldier said, but the radio’s high output means the Russians can find the locations they are broadcasting from.
“This is why we stopped communicating and only communicated the necessary minimum, such as if an evacuation was needed or an urgent help,” the soldier, who goes by the name Raccoon, added.
Materially NATO is not ready to fight. Politically it is also not ready.
John Helmer quotes excerpts from an interview with the former chief of staff of the Polish army, Miecyslaw Gocul:
You complain, and [NATO Secretary-General] Jens Stoltenberg has announced: “The NATO summit in Madrid will be groundbreaking. With a new strategic concept, we will make a fundamental change in NATO’s deterrence and defense.”
Before the NATO summit in Warsaw [in 2016]), at the Pact’s military committee, I asked Stoltenberg: what will be the guarantees for the eastern flank? He replied with a question: what else does Poland expect? I said straight out: security and prosperity, which is what the rest of us sitting at the table want.”
“Just like then, I hear the same slogans today, such as ‘do more with less’. There are also other fine-sounding calls, but these are only political slogans calculated for a positive public reaction and minimizing costs. They do not really bring about any political and military solutions….Now the tension between Russia and Lithuania is growing, because the sanctions are blocking the Kaliningrad Oblast more and more. Could this be a hotspot?
If Putin wanted to start the war further and decided to cut a corridor through the Baltics to the Kaliningrad District at the SuwaĆki Gap, what forces could stop him? Could the forces of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland stop Putin? Not at all. Putin will not be stopped by the Americans, who are present on the eastern flank only in small numbers. I repeat, Russia talks and calculates only with strong countries and organizations. And NATO in our region is weak.
It indeed is. And except for few east European hot heads, everyone hopes that it will stay so. None of the bigger NATO member countries wants a large fight with Russia. That includes the United States. Why then prepare for it? Why buy weapons that will never be used?
On the other side Russia does not want anything from Europe. It does not have an ideology that seeks expansion. It wants to be left alone.
NATO is a cold war relic that was kept alive to give the U.S. some political advantages. Its real purpose has never changed: keep Germany down, Russia out and the U.S. in Europe. That will only change when western Europe starts to rebel against it.
Unfortunately the chances for that are low.
The Disappearance Of Meghan Marohn
https://popularresistance.org/the-disappearance-of-meghan-marohn/
Chris Hedges
There is a national epidemic of missing girls and women.
This is the story of a friend who has become one of these grim statistics.
There is a national epidemic of missing girls and women. This is the story of a friend who has become one of these grim statistics.
A few days before Meghan Marohn, a 42-year-old English teacher at Shaker High School in Latham, New York, disappeared, she confided to friends that she had gone into hiding to escape from a man who had “brutally harassed and intimidated me because I wouldn’t sleep with him.” She said she was too afraid to stay at home, especially when she saw him drive by her house. She was granted a leave from teaching and camped out at The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She was last seen on March 27. It was cold, snowy, and windy.
Her black Subaru was found at a trailhead on Church Street in South Lee at the 46-acre Janet Longcope Park about two miles from the inn. Her car was unlocked. The car keys, the hotel key, her daily diary, her good luck stuffed animal Bun, her computer, her wallet, the book she was reading, The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry, and cell phone were missing. The last ping from her cell phone did not come from the loop trail in the park, but in a rural residential area across the road. Police combed the park and surrounding area. Nothing. It has been nearly fourteen weeks.
Was Meghan murdered? Was she abducted and taken somewhere? Did she go underground? Did she walk into the nearby Housatonic River with stones in her pockets to drown herself the way Virginia Woolf, whom she idolized and who was a victim of sexual abuse, did on March 28, 1941, in the River Ouse? Meghan, a poet and gifted writer, was a voracious reader. She would have been aware of the date of Woolf’s suicide which so eerily coincides with her disappearance. But, being a writer, as well as deeply empathetic, it is doubtful she would have killed herself without leaving a note.
All of this is speculation. What is not speculation is that, like many girls and women, she feared for her life because of male violence. She would not have gone to the Red Lion Inn if she had not been afraid. If she were not afraid, she would, I expect, still be with us.
Over a quarter of a million girls and women go missing in the U.S. every year. Male-perpetrated violence, especially domestic violence, is intimately linked to missing girls and women. The FBI reports more than 80 percent of violent crimes are committed by men. That is 99.1 percent of rapes committed by men and 88.7 percent of murders and manslaughters committed by men.
Meghan was white and well-educated. She was loved and respected in her community. Her case was covered in the local press. But poor girls and women, especially of color, disappear in the U.S. without little investigation or public outcry. Some 40 percent of all girls and women reported missing are people of color – 100,000 out of 250,000 – although they are 16 percent of the population. In Montana, 26 percent of all missing person reports are Native girls and women) who make up less than 7 percent of the state’s population. Few, outside the small circle of family and friends, care.
This epidemic of male violence against girls and women is not a law enforcement priority. It is also not, as it should be, part of our national discourse. But Meghan, whom I knew, like all these girls and women, should not be allowed to become statistics. Their stories, which include weeks, months and even years of abuse and sexual assault, lead to severe psychological and physical distress. Meghan, sadly, was hardly alone.
I met Meghan in September 2011 at the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park. She was, at the time, teaching English at Chatham High School in New Jersey. She approached me in the park dressed in a wild cacophony of cast-off clothes – she only shopped at thrift stores – and a mass of thick red hair. She asked me to speak to her high school philosophy club. I don’t usually speak at high schools, but her passion, her persistence, her literacy and brilliance, and her devotion to her students led me to agree. She used the same powers of persuasion to get Cornel West to visit her students.
I often speak at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, a remarkable grassroots organization in an old church that runs a small radio station, community science lab, cultivates urban gardens, programs for inner-city youth, gives space to artists and has broadcast quality television equipment to record lectures and make documentaries.
Not surprisingly, once she moved to Troy, Meghan gravitated to The Sanctuary. I would see her there. Steve Pierce and Branda Miller, who run The Sanctuary and who organize a vegan dinner before my talks, would invariably wrench me away from a heated discussion with Meghan about some poet or author to go into the sanctuary and give my lecture.
Meghan disliked Ernest Hemingway for his misogyny and cult of masculinity, which mar Hemingway’s work, but I admire Hemingway for his writing on war, which is some of the best anti-war literature of the 20th century, as well as for his lyricism and rhythm. This would have us throwing scenes from A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as his short stories, back and forth. We agreed that Moby Dick, which we had each read multiple times, is the greatest American novel. Moby Dick always led us to trade effusive encomiums since, like the plays of William Shakespeare, Herman Melville delineates human nature, the repressive hierarchy of western society, the demented and doomed quests that seduce us, our commodification of nature and the moral neutrality of the universe. Melville lived for a time in Troy. His dilapidated house, rarely visited, is a museum Meghan arranged on one trip for me to tour.
She loved her students. She spoke about them constantly. Many were poor, some the victims of gun violence, which devastated Meghan. She could never come to grips with the cruelty of this world. She was of Irish descent. On the night before St. Patrick’s Day she would stay up late baking loaves of soda bread for her students. She took her students from New Jersey on long field trips in New York, for which they were required to bring their journals and write. She would have them visit the carousel in Central Park. In the final scene in The Catcher in the Rye Holden watches his little sister – Phoebe – go around and around on it, trying to catch the golden ring dangling from the dispenser. Her students would sit in front of the carousel and write their reflections on the book. She led her students up the metal ladders on the Rutherfurd Observatory on top of Pupin Hall at Columbia University in the rain, over the Brooklyn Bridge, to The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the Tenement Museum. She took them on edible food tours of Central Park and out at night to look through telescopes at the rings of Saturn. She was one of those unique, impassioned, endlessly curious and deeply caring teachers that transform young lives. In Troy, although chronically short of money, she could be found at the downtown diner at night feeding kids she mentored who came from low-income families.
Meghan would become hot with anger at the focus in schools on “vocational” texts, designed to teach students about the “real” world, by which school administrators meant the world of technology, business and careerism. This was not the real world to Meghan. How were her students to discover and speak about love if they did not read Anna Karenina, Pablo Neruda and Romeo and Juliet? How were they to understand war if they did not read All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got His Gun? How were they to grasp the mechanics of tyranny if they did not read George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Mikhail Bulgakov? How were they to explore race if they did not read W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison? How were they to cope with the capacity of human evil if they did not read the literature of the Holocaust, which she taught to high school seniors? How were they to begin to process the inevitability of despair, disappointment, and death if they did not read Anton Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath?
She gave too freely of herself. She was an easy mark for anyone with a sad story. She should have built better defensive walls. She was too good for this world, too trusting, too caring and too vulnerable. She paid for this by having her heart broken many times. She carried under her exuberance the weight of sadness that comes with loving without restraint.
When Meghan’s brother Peter Naple went to collect Meghan’s things from her room at The Red Lion Inn, he found these books: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, The Heights of Machu Picchu by Pablo Neruda, The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston, Howard’s End by E.M. Forster and Favorite Folk Tales from Around the World edited by Jane Yolen.
Part of Meghan’s charm was that she was quirky, in the way iconoclasts and artists are often quirky. It wasn’t only her clothes, which looked like they had been lifted out of the discount barrel of the thrift store, which they probably had, but her connection with a universe she believed was a living entity, one filled with mysterious spiritual forces. She adored Carl Sagan – she named her cat after him – and would remind her students, as Sagan said, that “we are made of star-stuff.” She often went on long walks in the woods, even in the rain. She would find strange fungi or go out on successive nights to watch the phases of the moon, sending pictures of these wonders, missed by so many in the hectic pace of daily life, to her friends. How could we ignore these miracles?
She was a local leader for Extinction Rebellion, which uses non-violent civil disobedience to halt our march towards mass extinction. She was in jail after an Extinction Rebellion protest in New York City when she got word that her mother, also a teacher, had suffered a brain aneurysm and was on life support. The loss of her mother only intensified her interest in the mystery of life and death. She haunted graveyards. Periodically the last text her mother sent to her would pop up on the screen in her Subaru. It read: “Mama 12:00 am. Meg – I l9ve you. There Are no guarantees in life. LBve for the moment now.”
Meghan was sure these intermittent messages had been sent by her mother’s spirit.
She would set up her typewriter at the Troy Flea market, along River Street during the Enchanted City festival, at Troy Night Out on the last Friday of every month or on Freedom Square with a sign that read: “Troy Poem Project.” She would coax a poem out of whomever sat next to her, typing it out on a piece of paper and then giving it to the newly minted poet. Or she would help children type letters to parents in prison.
Her brother Peter created a website, findmeghanmarohn.com. It has a message board for tips. But the case is growing cold. It has been a long time.
Meghan’s magnetism makes it hard to believe she is gone.
But is she? Isn’t it that we feel the overwhelming energy she dedicated to the good? The prophets remind us that love is the greatest force on earth, that by loving others, especially those who are neglected, lonely and abused, hope and light are not extinguished.
Meghan lived in the real world, the one many around her could not see. This was her curse, and her gift.
Sunday, July 3, 2022
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