Karl Marx came up with the term “metabolic rift” to explain the crack or rift that capitalism has created between social and natural systems, humans and nature. This rift, he claimed, led to the exploitation of the environment and ecological crisis. Marx argued that we humans are all part of nature and he was also the first one who saw social societies as an organism with a metabolism similar to that of humans. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from 1844, Marx wrote that:

“Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”

The general idea is that disruptions, or interruptions, in natural cycles and processes creates an metabolic rift between nature and social systems which leads to a buildup of waste and in the end to the degradation of our environment.

(more…)

Maybe he liked the city? Either way, President Barack Obama announced today that he will attend the climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December. The climate summit is held between 7-18 December and is the last chance we have to take action against “the greatest threat the world has ever faced”.

“U.S. President Barack Obama will go to Copenhagen for a U.N. climate change meeting on December 9, hoping to add momentum to an international process despite slow progress on a domestic bill to cut carbon emissions”, Reuters reports.

“Obama planned to make a visit at the beginning of the climate negotiations in Denmark, an administration official told Reuters on Wednesday, before picking up the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in neighboring Oslo.”

With him to the climate summit Obama has a pledge to cut emissions in the USA with 17% from 2005 levels by 2020, 30% by 2025, 42% by 2030 and 83% by 2050. But these numbers are much lower than those proposed by the EU and other industrialised countries such as Norway.

(more…)

The Inter Press Service has an interesting interview with James Lovelock, known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, about everything from the IPCC to geo-engineering and climate tipping points.

Lovelock has earlier said that he believes that climate change is now irreversible. He predicts that the major part of the humans, more than six billion people, will get wiped out of the face of the earth due to wars, starvation, epidemics and chaos during the rest of the century due to the effects of a changing climate. Lovelock estimates that by year 2100 there will only be around 500 millions people left who struggles to survive on the few remaining liveable places on earth: Scandinavia, Canada and Iceland.

In the IPS interview Lovelock says he hopes that once climate disaster strikes “we will stay civilised and those in the North will give refuge to the unimaginably large numbers of climate refugees”:

“TIERRAMÉRICA: What will this new climate be like?

JL: The tropical and subtropical zones of the Earth will be too hot and dry to grow food or support human life. People will be forced to migrate towards the poles to places like Canada. There will be less than one billion people by the end of the century. My hope is that we will stay civilised and those in the North will give refuge to the unimaginably large numbers of climate refugees.”

(more…)

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.”

Read this important piece on the Guardian!

Photo credit: suburbanbloke

Man-made climate change will render half of the world’s inhabited areas unliveable. And we humans will not be able to adapt to a warmer climate as good as previously thought, a US climate expert warned during a climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Steven Sherwood, a climate expert at Yale University, warned that parts of China, India and eastern USA will become so warm during the summers that people will not be able to lose heat by sweating, and thus making those parts unliveable.

The physiological limits of the human body will begin to render places impossible to support human life if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels, he said.

“There will be some places on Earth where it would simply be impossible to lose heat,” Sherwood said. “This is quite imaginable if we continue burning fossil fuels. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t end up there.”

(more…)

Photo credit: 8zil

During a climate change summit in Copenhagen last week, with more than 2,000 researchers from 80 countries attending, scientists warned that global sea levels could rise with more than a metre, or more, by 2100. The rising sea levels, they warn, will displace 10% of the world’s population, around 600 million people who live in low-lying countries.

Just last week I told you that scientists are warning that the pace of climate change “have largely outpaced” the models and estimates from the IPCC 2007 report. And now this report shows that the rise in global sea levels is up to three times worse than previously predicted by the conservative estimates from IPCC .

“I would predict sea level rise by 2100 in the order of 1m,” Prof Konrad Steffen, of the University of Colorado, said. “It could be 1.2m or 0.9m, but it is 1m or more seeing the current change, which is up to three times more than the average predicted by the IPCC. It is a major change and it actually calls for action.”

(more…)

Photo credit: jonasclemens

During the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recently scientists warned that the pace of climate change ”have largely outpaced” the models and estimates from the IPCC 2007 report. They warned that the pace of man-made climate change is much faster than previously expected due to increased emissions from the industrial sector and that the higher temperatures have started to trigger self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms.

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University and member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said.

If you have been following this blog for a while you know I’ve warned on numerous occasions that the climate predictions from the IPCC have been way too conservative. And now we see scientists, like Field, from the IPCC coming out and warning us that climate change is accelerating much faster than their conservative climate models have predicted.

(more…)

Photo credit: pfala

A new scientific study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in USA shows that “there’s no going back” from climate change caused by carbon dioxide. The study, led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon, has reached the shocking conclusion that the effects of man-made climate change are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are completely stopped.

“Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet,” said Solomon, who is based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said. “But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.”

(more…)

Tomorrow a new and updated version of last year’s climate report, Climate Code Red, will be released. The Climate Safety report from the Public Interest Research Center (PIRC), an independent charity studying and communicating vital global issues in the UK, is expected to trash the out-dated climate predictions from the IPCC, and show that the climate doesn’t change little by little but instead in a landslide.

“The “Climate Safety” report gives a simple summary of the latest science, delivering a clear message that to have any chance of maintaining a safe climate, we must rapidly decarbonise our society, preserve global sinks, and address the problem with an unprecedented degree of seriousness.”

The new report is said to show that we can’t afford to follow Brown’s or Obama’s climate plans, which both calls for an 80% reduction in global emissions. Instead global emissions must decline by between 6-8% per year from 2020 to 2040, and lead up to a complete 100% decarbonisation by 2050, according to a paper by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

(more…)

The 2009 Australian Climate Action Summit of Climate Change Activists will be held in Canberra on the weekend before the first day of the 2009 Federal Parliament – Saturday 31st January – Monday 2nd February 2009.

According to the organizers: “Australia’s Climate Action Summit will be two days of facilitated meetings and workshops. There will be an open public program for anyone to join, and a restricted program for people from climate change groups, who will create a strategic national climate campaign and form a national grassroots network. The weekend will be followed on the Monday by one day of dynamic training in climate campaigning skills for taking action, facilitating climate action groups, effective lobbying and more.”

On Tuesday 3rd February, the first day of the 2009 Federal Parliament, there will be a demonstration at Parliament House and the grassroots climate network created at Australia’s Climate Action Summit will launch its national campaign at Parliament House.

(more…)