An Oxfam report published concurrently with the signing of the Paris Agreement showed that the richest 10 percent of the world’s population are responsible for 50 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, and that the poorest 50 percent are responsible for only 10 percent of emissions.
Al Gore: 2006 Global Warming ‘Point of No Return’ Claim Was ‘Accurate’
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Former Vice President Al Gore discussed his 2006 warning that unless the nations took “drastic measures, the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years” when it comes to climate change and global warming.
Gore said his “point of no return claim” was, unfortunately, “accurate,” but celebrated that the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have made climate a top priority.
“You said back in 2006 the world would reach the point of no return if we didn’t reduce greenhouse gases in 2016. Is it already too late?” asked ABC News’ Jonathan Karl in an interview which aired Sunday on “This Week.”
“[S]ome changes, unfortunately, have already been locked in place,” Gore replied. “Sea level increases are going to continue to matter what we do now. But, we can prevent much larger sea level increases. Much more rapid increases in temperature. The heatwave was in Europe. Now it’s in the Arctic. We’re seeing huge melting of the ice there. So, the warnings of the scientists 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, unfortunately, were accurate. Here’s the good news, Jonathan, in the Democratic contest for the presidential nominations this year, virtually all of the candidates agree this is either the top issue or one of top two issues.”
He then added, “I think it’s great that there are so many of these candidates who are really making it their top priority and who are really focusing on introducing bold plans. I’m really encouraged by that.”
Climate change reports warn of a world on the brink
12 August 2019
Last week’s reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Resources Institute point to the increasing risk of a climate change-induced environmental catastrophe inflicting untold suffering on billions of people.
The UN report, “Climate Change and Land,” demonstrates that 821 million human beings already suffering from hunger face starvation as the land on which they depend for sustenance loses its ability to support agricultural infrastructure. These men, women and children are part of a broader 3.2 billion people who are living in areas that will be eroded, flooded, turned into deserts or destroyed by wildfires, hurricanes or cyclones in the coming decades.
The World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct project reports that 17 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, comprising a quarter of the world’s population, are in peril of using up their available fresh water. This “Day Zero” scenario would cause droughts that are four times as costly as floods—destroying crops, causing power outages, increasing the risk of preventable diseases and potentially causing mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people, stressing water supplies in even more parts of the globe.
There is no doubt that global warming caused by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas for over a century has led to these social crises. The transformation of arable land into desert, the disappearance of coastal areas resulting from rising ocean levels, and the sinking of cities due to the melting of permafrost have all been linked in hundreds of studies to climate change. These are part of broader processes that have produced more intense heat waves in the past decade and more rapid melting of glaciers.
Such trends are in line with numerical predictions made as early as 1896, which showed that burning fossil fuels and the resulting release of carbon dioxide would warm the planet’s surface. This was reflected in a 1912 newspaper short from New Zealand asserting that the two billion tons of coal being burned every year were adding about seven billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which “tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature.”
These early estimates of greenhouse gas emissions have been verified and updated every year since 1958, when the measurement station at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii began recording a continual increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. Like clockwork, the release of more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has preceded a rise in the planet’s average global temperature, a trend that has been escalating since the 1980s.
Of greater concern in the modern era is the fact that Earth’s climate is entering a qualitatively different stage. For the past half century, humanity’s industrial activity has rivaled geophysical processes in its influence on the changes in the Earth’s environment. An article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS) titled “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” warns that the current shifts in the Earth’s climate are poised to accelerate.
Global warming, the study predicts, is feeding into other geophysical processes that aren’t directly related to carbon dioxide emissions, such as the mass release of methane from permafrost melting. This convergence threatens to produce a “Hothouse Earth,” where global warming quickens and is no longer directly related to the burning of fossil fuels. Such a scenario would be exponentially more difficult for modern scientific techniques to contain.
The consequences of such a development would be catastrophic. The extreme weather events of the past decade would be only the precursors of much more devastating storms, longer heat waves, dryer droughts and nonstop wildfires. Coral reefs across the world would die, eliminating significant parts of the food chain. Glacial melting and sea level rise would flood every coastal city on the planet, home to approximately one third of the world's population, potentially drowning billions of people. At least one million of the Earth’s species would die and continent-scale portions of the world’s surface would become uninhabitable.
The PNAS report is one of many published in the past decade calling for the reorganization of the world’s energy production and transportation infrastructure and the development of new technologies to immediately halt carbon emissions. Such data has not stopped US President Trump from slashing climate research by various federal agencies by up to 84 percent in his proposed budget for fiscal year 2020.
The political Neanderthals in the White House and their fascistic co-thinkers the world over, such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, do not see the deaths of billions of men, women and children as a cataclysmic event, but rather as the cost of doing business to further enrich themselves and their fellow oligarchs.
This does not mean that politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “Green New Deal” offer any solution to the climate crisis. They pose the problem as one that can be solved on a purely national basis, as if the flow of air in the atmosphere can be stopped by a customs checkpoint. Even the much-vaunted Paris Agreement, supposedly an international accord to halt climate change, is both inadequate and toothless, as demonstrated by Trump’s withdrawal two years ago.
At the same time, the measures proposed by the ruling elites are seen as weapons to be used against their geopolitical rivals. The carbon trading schemes promoted by the United Nations are directed less to limiting greenhouse gas emissions than to providing new means for the older industrialized countries to undercut the developing economies, which burn a great deal of coal and oil to fuel their economies. Such schemes have played a key role in the efforts of the United States to contain and cripple China.
A number of Democratic presidential candidates, including Cory Booker, John Delaney, Jay Inslee and Pete Buttigieg, are promoting a “climate corps” as an extension of the “Green New Deal.” They thereby seek to mobilize youth to defend US “national security” under the guise of fighting climate change. The concept has been touted as a 21st century version of the Peace Corps and a “soft power” check against Russia and China.
The attitudes of supposedly “progressive” representatives of the ruling class demonstrate that there exists among them no constituency to tackle global warming. They operate within the confines of the nation-state system and never challenge the private ownership of production, the two main factors that stand in the way of a rational, scientifically guided international transformation of economic relations and methods to halt and reverse carbon emissions.
This demonstrates, as Frederick Engels presciently indicated in The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, that capitalism itself is the primary obstacle to solving threats to the natural environment.
“All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at achieving the most immediately and directly useful effect of labor,” he wrote. “The further consequences, which appear only later and become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation, were totally neglected … In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominately concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result.”
As if to emphasize Engels’ analysis, the 2017 Carbon Majors Report showed that 70 percent of all greenhouse gases released from 1988 to 2015 came from just 100 companies. An Oxfam report published concurrently with the signing of the Paris Agreement showed that the richest 10 percent of the world’s population are responsible for 50 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, and that the poorest 50 percent are responsible for only 10 percent of emissions.
These studies expose as slander the statements made by bourgeois politicians, corporate media outlets, postmodernists and pseudo-left groups that global warming is caused by workers’ “lifestyles,” “diets” and “consumer culture.” The Earth’s environment is being polluted, poisoned and burned by the capitalist class and cannot be saved until this parasitic and destructive social layer is abolished. The social force to accomplish this task is the international working class. The method is world socialist revolution.
Hottest July on record signals accelerated climate change
This past month, July 2019, marked the warmest month ever recorded, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Programme of the European Union. Globally, the temperature was 0.56 degrees Celsius higher than the average for 1981 to 2010, and slightly exceeded the previous monthly high reached in July 2016. The record heat was widespread, reaching across North America, Europe, Siberia, central Asia, Iran, and Antarctica.
This is not a temporary aberration. The last four years, 2015-2018, have been the hottest on record. If current trends continue, 2019 is likely to be the second hottest year after 2016. According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), every month since May 2015 has been more than 1 degree Celsius hotter than average.
Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), stated, “July has re-written climate history, with dozens of new temperature records at local, national and global level.” He went on, “This is not science fiction. It is the reality of climate change. It is happening now and it will worsen in the future without urgent climate action.”
Of especial significance is that global temperature has nearly reached 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—approaching the 1.5 degree mark which scientists warn represents a “tipping point” when catastrophic and perhaps irreversible changes to the climate will begin. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on its current trajectory the world is likely to reach that point by 2030.
The cause of this warming is not in dispute among the overwhelming majority of scientists. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in its Fifth Assessment Report (2014) that there is a 95 percent probability that human activities—principally the emissions of greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide— are driving the increasing temperature. Industrial activities over the last 150 years have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million to 400 parts per million.
The Swiss National Centre for Climate Services predicts that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, average summer temperatures may be up to 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) higher by the middle of this century.
The unprecedented heat was felt in many places around the world. In Europe, this summer’s heat wave not only broke records, but shattered them. In Paris, for example, the temperature reached 42.6 Celsius (108.7 Fahrenheit), beating the previous record for the city of 40.4 degrees, set more than 70 years ago. Some places in Western and Central Europe experienced daily averages of 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) above normal.
The consequences of global warming are manifested in a myriad of ways. Worldwide, glaciers are melting at a rate faster than predicted less than a decade ago. Fluctuations in the rates of melting will have significant effects on the millions of people around the world regarding flooding, drinking water, and irrigation.
This year, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, second largest in the world after that of Antarctica, may reach or exceed the volume lost in 2012, the highest recorded so far. According to the UN World Meteorological Organization, 160 billion tons of ice have been lost in July alone. This huge influx of freshwater into the North Atlantic is likely to have significant impact on the Gulf Stream which, in turn, will alter weather patterns in eastern North America and Western Europe
Wildfires are breaking out across the Arctic at an unprecedented rate. More than 100 have so far this year been reported in Greenland,
iberia, and Alaska. These fires emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide from burning vegetation—an estimated 100 megatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere between June 1 and July 21, according to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), thus making a significant contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, accelerating global warming even further.
The dire consequences of global warming to the lives of billions of people around the world in the coming decades are highlighted in just-released reports by the United Nations and the World Resources Institute. Over 3 billion people face extreme shortages of food and water in the immediate future unless drastic measures are undertaken. As the heating of the world continues, extreme weather events (hurricanes, droughts, wildfires), sea level rise, mass extinctions, ecosystem degradation, and other environmental disruptions will intensify and spread across growing portions of the planet. Population movements of climate refugees will occur on a scale that will dwarf the current migrant/refugee crises.
The climate crisis is part of the overall crisis of capitalism, which poses an existential threat to humanity. Whether from environmental collapse or nuclear holocaust, or both, the continued existence of human beings and, indeed, most other forms of life on earth are under imminent threat of extinction. Both of these dangers flow inevitably from the contradictions of capitalism—the most fundamental of these being the globalized nature of the economy versus the division of the world into rival nation states. Not only is inter-imperialist competition for global domination leading inexorably toward world war, but this same rivalry also renders impossible the kind of scientifically planned, globally coordinated effort necessary if the processes driving climate change are to be halted and reversed.
The feeble efforts so far attempted under capitalism to address the climate crises have been completely ineffective, as clearly demonstrated by the accelerating rate of global warming. For several decades now, the scientific community has raised increasingly urgent warnings that fundamental measures to address climate change must be immediately undertaken if catastrophe is to be avoided. And yet, nothing is done because the right of the major corporations to maximize profit must not be abridged. Current proposals, such as the Green New Deal in the US, pale into insignificance compared to the scale of the necessary task, because they accept the framework of capitalism and the private ownership of the means of production.
The technical means exist to address the climate crisis. Seventy percent of all greenhouse gas emissions originate from just 100 companies. However, in order to effectively implement these solutions, control of the world economy must be taken away from the tiny minority of capitalists and put into the hands of the working class to build a socialist society on an international basis for the benefit of all.
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