2014 was the hottest calendar year in all the years that we have measured temperatures. 2014 saw the warmest temperatures, by far, ever recorded in the northern Pacific. It was also the year when we learned, tragically, that the melt of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now irreversible. Twenty-five years ago, when I wrote the first book-length account of this crisis, none of these wounds could have been predicted. But that’s because scientists are conservative—the damage has outpaced their forecasts. Every ocean, including the one outside these doors, is now 30 percent more acidic than a generation ago. Every continent now sees drought and flood on an unprecedented scale. Every scientific body now urges upon us, with ever more desperate rhetoric, the need for action. You’ll find in your packet, as one concise reminder of the relevant points, a recent publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science outlining, once more, the grim and by now very plain facts of climate change. And yet, so little action has come.... In late September, 400,000 people filled the streets of New York to demand that the U.N. take action on climate. That was the largest demonstration about anything in the U.S. for some years and the largest demonstration about climate change in history. Those people were joined that day by protesters in 2,600 other cities around the world. The world’s first truly global problem is seeing the world’s first truly global movement. And it is beginning to have an effect. The same night of that march in New York, the heirs to the Rockefeller fortune announced that they were divesting their holdings in fossil fuel companies. The first family of fossil fuel was selling its oil stock. In so doing—in so doing, they joined institutions, from Stanford University to the Church of Sweden—and hopefully soon the city of Stockholm and many others in this green-minded country. Just as 30 years ago, when the question was apartheid in South Africa, the world’s people are coming together to withdraw their money from the companies that simply refuse to change their practices. Those companies—Exxon, Shell, Chevron, Gazprom, China Coal, BP, all the rest—have in their combined reserves five times more carbon than the world’s scientists say we can safely burn. And yet those companies have told their shareholders and their banks that they will dig up that coal and oil and gas, and burn it. If they carry out those business plans, then there is no mystery about how this story ends: The planet will simply break. democracynow.org/2014/12/31/at_end_of_warmest_year_on
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 01:42:57 +0000
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