And so the evacuation has begun. Just a few weeks ago the first five families from the Carteret Islands, a small coral atoll far off the coast from Papua New Guinea with a population of around 2600 people, abandon their homes. This is the first evacuation of an entire people due to man-made climate change.
“As the Ecologist’s blogger Dan Box witnessed, the first five families have moved to Bougainville to prepare the ground for full evacuation. There are compounding factors – the removal of mangrove forests and some local volcanic activity – but the main problem appears to be rising sea levels. The highest point of the islands is 170cm above the sea. Over the past few years they have been repeatedly inundated by spring tides, wiping out the islanders’ vegetable and fruit gardens, destroying their subsistence and making their lives impossible.”
It is worth noting that these families are not the first climate refugees in the world. People have abandoned their homes due to natural climate changes before. One example of that can be the abandoned olive presses from the Roman Empire which can be found in North Africa – where once trees and olives flourished there is now just deserts.
Nobel peace prize winner, former vice-president and climate crusader Al Gore gives a short (7 minutes) updated presentation on the state of our climate. Besides highlighting some of the latest climate science Gore also talks about the “clean coal” lie.
The video comes from a TED conference in February 2009. Watch it:
Last week Australia essentially committed itself to Climate Genocide – but the term has not been used and indeed is largely excluded from any mention in public discourse in Australia. The extreme right wing, pro-coal, pro-war Rudd Labor Australian Government unveiled an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that in reality means that Australia’s world-leading annual per capita domestic and exported greenhouse gas (GHG) will fall from its present value of 54 tonnes per person per year to 44-49 by 2020 (see “Pro-coal Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) devalues Australian lives, threatens Biosphere and ignores Science“).
Climate Genocide has already begun in the non-European World in which 16 million people die avoidably every year from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease. This Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust is increasingly impacted by Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW; man-made global warming) – there are already hundreds of thousands of Climate Refugees in Darfur (Sudan), India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Pacific, with far worse to come, especially for states that are drought-prone, mega-deltaic or which are small islands (see “Climate Disruption, Climate Emergency, Climate Genocide & Penultimate Bengali Holocaust through Sea Level Rise”).
Global warming is exaggerated and is just hyped by climate scientists. It’s not a big deal. That is what you might think if you listen to the mainstream media and its misinformation, or if you believe in the denier’s lies and their anti-science rhetoric about man-made climate change.
But that is so far from the truth that it’s absurd as a recent poll among climate experts and scientists clearly show. The poll conducted by the Guardian during the scientific conference in Copenhagen earlier this year shows that 9 out of 10 climate experts don’t believe we will be able to restrict climate change to 2C:
“Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed, a Guardian poll reveals today. An average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints.
Such a change would disrupt food and water supplies, exterminate thousands of species of plants and animals and trigger massive sea level rises that would swamp the homes of hundreds of millions of people.
The poll of those who follow global warming most closely exposes a widening gulf between political rhetoric and scientific opinions on climate change. While policymakers and campaigners focus on the 2C target, 86% of the experts told the survey they did not think it would be achieved. A continued focus on an unrealistic 2C rise, which the EU defines as dangerous, could even undermine essential efforts to adapt to inevitable higher temperature rises in the coming decades, they warned.”
A survey released this week by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows that only 47% of people in the USA believes there is evidence of man-made climate change. Although a majority “believes” in climate change, over 20% doesn’t think there is any evidence of the earth warming. And among white evangelical Protestants in USA only 34% believes the earth is warming due to human activity, while over 30% don’t believe in it at all.
Just recently an ice bridge which linked a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped and melted away. Scientists say this is a result of man-made climate change and warns that this collapse could mean the end for Wilkins Ice Shelf, a much larger ice shelf.
“The rapid retreat of glaciers there demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing — more rapidly than previously known — as a consequence of climate change,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement.
However an Ontario, Canada Government commissioned analysis has revealed that when you take environmental and human mortality impacts into account the “true cost” of coal burning-based power was 4-5 times greater than the “market cost” – this making the best renewables and geothermal much cheaper than the “true cost” of coal burning-based power (see “Ontario study identifies social costs of coal-fired power plants”).
Another way of seeing this is that it can be estimated (from arithmetic projection from the Canada study) that about 5,000 Australians die every year from the effects of deadly pollutants from coal burning (heavy metals, carbon monoxide, radioactivity, soot, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide) i.e. Australia sacrifices 5,000 lives each year on the altar of heavily-subsidized coal burning-based power (see “How many people die from Carbon Burning and Climate Change each year?”).
George Monbiot, Europe’s leading green commentator, says it’s all over. But argues we can’t afford to abandon our efforts to cut emissions. Because if we do “our prophecy is bound to come true”.
“Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than 2C of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with 4C. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.”
Mohamed Nasheed, President of the Maldives, gives this inspiring speech in light of the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference this December – the last chance we have to take action against “the greatest threat the world has ever faced”.
In the video (above) Nasheed announces that his country, which is under severe threat from climate change, will go completely carbon neutral in a decade. He also asks the world to unite against carbon pollution and decarbonize the entire world economy.
This past weekend it was Earth Hour, a global climate change event in which millions of people from around the world participate in by turning off their lights. For one hour. According to the campaigners of Earth Hour this will “make a statement about the urgent need for action on climate change”. But isn’t Earth Hour just a huge and pointless greenwash stunt to make us feel good about our self?
“Repeatedly in focus groups, people adopt a defensive stance against people who – they feel – are using the issue to take away material benefits. Asking people to sit in the dark plays very well to a widely held prejudice that “the greens” want us all to go back to living in caves.
[...]The metaphors of darkness are overwhelmingly negative: danger, decay, and death. We see the dark ages as a time of brutality. Poets such as Dylan Thomas call on us to “rage against the dying of the light”. Sir Edward Grey on the eve of the first world war said “the lamps are going out all over Europe”. Really the cultural resonance could hardly be worse.”
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George Monbiot, Europe’s leading green commentator, says it’s all over. But argues we can’t afford to abandon our efforts to cut emissions. Because if we do “our prophecy is bound to come true”.
