Climate Links March 2019 #2

State of Ontario's climate policy is 'frightening,' watchdog says. CTV News. March 27, 2019.

Diane Saxe: "If the world can't hold together on the Paris Agreement we are toasted, roasted and grilled."

Your plans for revolution don't work. Nothing we've tried works. Caitlin Johnstone. Mar 28, 2019.

We are well on our way to extinction via climate collapse or nuclear holocaust, and even if we miss those by some miracle we are headed toward an artificial intelligence-led tech dystopia in which our consciousness is permanently enslaved by a propaganda network that is far too advanced for there to be any hope of escaping into truth. 

We are witnessing a mass extinction the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth’s food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops. 

Our ecosystem is very fragile and rapidly fading, and the difference between the ability to survive without it and our current scientific capability is the difference between flying and jumping. Which won’t matter if one of the many small, unpredictable moving parts in the steadily escalating new cold war with Russia results in a nuclear weapon being deployed as a result of misunderstanding or miscommunication and sparking off the annihilation of every organism on earth, as nearly happened during the last cold war on more than one occasion. 

This is where the status quo has gotten us. All attempts to overthrow it have failed. The time is up, and the results are in. 

The political process doesn’t work.

... 

The reality is that as long as powerful people control the dominant public narratives, no ground will be gained in steering our species away from the status quo trajectory that’s killing us, because you won’t be able to awaken mainstream consciousness to what’s going on. The only thing that has any hope of prying the oligarchic hands off the steering wheel is the mainstream public seeing what they’re doing and using the power of their numbers to force drastic change in a wildly different direction. If we can’t make that happen, we’re all just banging on locked doors while the curtain closes on humanity.

Here's a running list of all the ways climate change has altered Earth in 2019. Mark Kaufman, mashable. Mar. 16, 2019.

Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. University of Adelaide, phys.org. Mar. 19, 2019.

A new study has revealed that the language used by the global climate change watchdog, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is overly conservative – and therefore the threats are much greater than the Panel's reports suggest.

3-5°C temperature rise is now ‘locked-in’ for the Arctic. UN Environment. March 13, 2019.

• Even if Paris Agreement goals met, Arctic winter temperatures will increase 3-5°C by 2050 compared to 1986-2005 levels.
• Thawing permafrost could wake ‘sleeping giant’ of more greenhouse gases, potentially derailing global climate goals.
• Ocean acidification and pollution also posing major threats to Arctic

Arctic Warming Locked In. Survival Acres. March 15, 2019.

here’s what the article DOESN’T tell you: 

This is the death of the planetary biosphere, i.e., “extinction of most life forms, including humans”.Warming of this magnitude in the Arctic means MORE then this warming in the rest of the world where nearly everyone else actually lives. As I’ve often explained, we starve first as food crops fail. There will be no escaping this fact. And this level of warming means a massive “carbon bomb” is released into the atmosphere and will be virtually unstoppable. 

Greenland and Antarctica will also contribute to massive sea level rise, inundating the coastlines worldwide, triggering a widespread refugee crisis. The article plays this down, but it’s a fact. Moreover, the article pretends to portray the “possibility” of meeting the Paris Agreements (a fabricated lie), and that “the impacts globally would also be huge”. No – they will be absolutely catastrophic, a extinction level event. 

This is yet another example of totally failing to report the actual facts (impacts) on what it’s going to mean for the world environment and human survival to lose the Arctic. This “soft approach” may appease editors and publications, but it’s definitely worse then disingenuous now, it’s downright genocidal. 

Predictably, they’re not going to bother and try to tell people what to do, because they have no idea.

Proposal for U.N. to study climate-cooling technologies rejected. Laurie Goering, Reuters, Mar. 14, 2019.

A push to launch a high-level study of potentially risky technological fixes to curb climate change was abandoned on Thursday at a U.N. environmental conference in Nairobi, as countries including the United States raised objections.

New Climate Change Visualization Presents Two Stark Choices For Our Future. Brian Kahn, Earther. Mar. 20, 2019.