Its End of the World And Nobody Cares
By James Donahue
October 3, 2016
In all of the years I have been working as a journalist this is a story I never thought I would ever live to write. It is a story about a looming end of our world that appears to be happening before our eyes, it may be out of control, and the U.S. media and general population is paying little attention.
Even as our ultra-dry forests are burning, our food crops are either suffering drought or floods, fierce storms are ravaging the landscape and leaving millions homeless, the arctic ice packs are melting, our seas are rising, the animals are dying and strange new killer diseases are striking, people are too caught up in politics, twitter and football to notice.
Or perhaps they are shuttering their eyes and minds out of fear.
I wrote these words as flames were devouring an ultra-dry forest in the hills over my home. The fire still burns but fire fighters appear to have it under some control. The only thing between that fire and the houses where I live is a forest of more dead and dried up trees and a thousand tired and sweaty fire fighters who are giving everything they have to save our property.
Al Gore, our former Vice President, tried to warn the world. He was heavily involved in the United Nations world conference on global warming in Kyoto, Japan, in 1992 when world leaders pledged to try to curb carbon emissions. Republican President George W. Bush, who defeated Gore's run for the presidency in 1998, scoffed at the global warming declarations and refused to direct the United States to join the UN nations in accepting the Kyoto Protocol.
Those were important years when we could have used our tax dollars to lead the world in a campaign to switch to green energy and stop the horrors that are now upon us.
After leaving office and losing his presidential bid Gore went on a lecture circuit. He released a frightening documentary, An Inconvenient Truth that clearly explained what carbon emissions were doing to our atmosphere and what was bound to happen if we didn’t find alternative types of fuel for operating our cars and heating our buildings. He was scoffed at. Oh how the world would have been changed if Bush and the five conservative members of the Supreme Court hadn’t stolen that 1998 election from Gore.
Most scientists agreed with Gore in those days, however, and they said so. They have been issuing even more severe warnings ever since. The corporate-owned media largely ignored their warnings and relied, instead, on counter reports from so-called and corporate-hired "climate experts" who issued reports that the arctic ice caps were getting colder and that periods of planet warming were natural events. Everybody believed the lie. They didn’t want to accept Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth.”
As the oceans collected the increased solar heat and all of that stored ocean heat began affecting dynamic weather events around the world, many government leaders began to worry. Another UN conference was held again last year in Paris, France, and another agreement was made to cap carbon emissions. President Barack Obama attended and brought the news home with him but the Republican dominated Congress refused to act. Mr. Obama, out of desperation, committed the United States by executive order during a recent G-20 Summit in China. But he still doesn’t have his ultra consertative government behind him.
Thus we wait for the outcome of another presidential election. One candidate, Republican Donald Trump like Bush, says global arming is a hoax. The Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, speaks vaguely about a switch to green energy but the threat of global warming does not appear to be high on her agenda.
What the 174 participating national representatives agreed to in Paris was to try to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, and a 1.5 degree Celsius goal by 2030. The UN is still waiting for ratification by at least 55 of those nations before making the agreement official.
Sadly, new climate reports this fall are saying the world's heat may have already surpassed the Paris Agreement goals.
A story last week by Dominique Mosbergen for the Huffington Post quotes researchers from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the Scripps Institute for Oceanography’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who all say CO2 levels in the world’s atmosphere have surpassed a dreaded level of 400 parts per million. They say it was hanging at this level in September, the time of the year just before the winter months when world CO2 levels are always at their lowest.
Another report by Paul Brown for the Climate News Network paints a stern warning but suggests that there may still be time to save ourselves if we act immediately. But the seven researchers that contributed to Brown's report said "the majority of people have to wake up to the stark realities and dangers of climate change."
To do this, however, the propaganda machine generated by the fossil fuel lobby has to be shut down and the paid-off politicians and journalists who are turning a blind eye on climate change must get on board if the looming catastrophe is to be avoided.
Sir Robert Watson, former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that "Climate change is happening now and much faster than anticipated."
Brown's story quotes Watson as saying a doubling or tripling of existing efforts is necessary to avoid exceeding the 2 degree Celsius "danger threshold" on global temperature rise agreed on in Paris.
There has always been a warning, dating some 20 years or more in the past, when top world scientists, including noted English physicist Stephen Hawking, said that once carbon levels get to a certain point, there is no going back. Hawking called it “runaway global warming." He said he perceived Earth turning into a burning lifeless globe like Venus. He predicted temperatures of 600 degrees or higher.
Heat like that will kill most living things, dry up our oceans, and leave Earth to be another spinning, lifeless rock in the solar system.
Mosbergen quoted Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps Institute CO2 monitoring program, who said carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. He said “even the most rigorous climate action won’t dampen this figure.”
And if we can’t turn off the spigot immediately on carbon emissions, the CO2 numbers, plus the methane gas that is being released by all of the “fracking” for new oil deposits and the melting sea ice, these numbers are only going to go higher. The higher they go the sooner we face our destruction.
By James Donahue
October 3, 2016
In all of the years I have been working as a journalist this is a story I never thought I would ever live to write. It is a story about a looming end of our world that appears to be happening before our eyes, it may be out of control, and the U.S. media and general population is paying little attention.
Even as our ultra-dry forests are burning, our food crops are either suffering drought or floods, fierce storms are ravaging the landscape and leaving millions homeless, the arctic ice packs are melting, our seas are rising, the animals are dying and strange new killer diseases are striking, people are too caught up in politics, twitter and football to notice.
Or perhaps they are shuttering their eyes and minds out of fear.
I wrote these words as flames were devouring an ultra-dry forest in the hills over my home. The fire still burns but fire fighters appear to have it under some control. The only thing between that fire and the houses where I live is a forest of more dead and dried up trees and a thousand tired and sweaty fire fighters who are giving everything they have to save our property.
Al Gore, our former Vice President, tried to warn the world. He was heavily involved in the United Nations world conference on global warming in Kyoto, Japan, in 1992 when world leaders pledged to try to curb carbon emissions. Republican President George W. Bush, who defeated Gore's run for the presidency in 1998, scoffed at the global warming declarations and refused to direct the United States to join the UN nations in accepting the Kyoto Protocol.
Those were important years when we could have used our tax dollars to lead the world in a campaign to switch to green energy and stop the horrors that are now upon us.
After leaving office and losing his presidential bid Gore went on a lecture circuit. He released a frightening documentary, An Inconvenient Truth that clearly explained what carbon emissions were doing to our atmosphere and what was bound to happen if we didn’t find alternative types of fuel for operating our cars and heating our buildings. He was scoffed at. Oh how the world would have been changed if Bush and the five conservative members of the Supreme Court hadn’t stolen that 1998 election from Gore.
Most scientists agreed with Gore in those days, however, and they said so. They have been issuing even more severe warnings ever since. The corporate-owned media largely ignored their warnings and relied, instead, on counter reports from so-called and corporate-hired "climate experts" who issued reports that the arctic ice caps were getting colder and that periods of planet warming were natural events. Everybody believed the lie. They didn’t want to accept Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth.”
As the oceans collected the increased solar heat and all of that stored ocean heat began affecting dynamic weather events around the world, many government leaders began to worry. Another UN conference was held again last year in Paris, France, and another agreement was made to cap carbon emissions. President Barack Obama attended and brought the news home with him but the Republican dominated Congress refused to act. Mr. Obama, out of desperation, committed the United States by executive order during a recent G-20 Summit in China. But he still doesn’t have his ultra consertative government behind him.
Thus we wait for the outcome of another presidential election. One candidate, Republican Donald Trump like Bush, says global arming is a hoax. The Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, speaks vaguely about a switch to green energy but the threat of global warming does not appear to be high on her agenda.
What the 174 participating national representatives agreed to in Paris was to try to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, and a 1.5 degree Celsius goal by 2030. The UN is still waiting for ratification by at least 55 of those nations before making the agreement official.
Sadly, new climate reports this fall are saying the world's heat may have already surpassed the Paris Agreement goals.
A story last week by Dominique Mosbergen for the Huffington Post quotes researchers from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the Scripps Institute for Oceanography’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who all say CO2 levels in the world’s atmosphere have surpassed a dreaded level of 400 parts per million. They say it was hanging at this level in September, the time of the year just before the winter months when world CO2 levels are always at their lowest.
Another report by Paul Brown for the Climate News Network paints a stern warning but suggests that there may still be time to save ourselves if we act immediately. But the seven researchers that contributed to Brown's report said "the majority of people have to wake up to the stark realities and dangers of climate change."
To do this, however, the propaganda machine generated by the fossil fuel lobby has to be shut down and the paid-off politicians and journalists who are turning a blind eye on climate change must get on board if the looming catastrophe is to be avoided.
Sir Robert Watson, former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that "Climate change is happening now and much faster than anticipated."
Brown's story quotes Watson as saying a doubling or tripling of existing efforts is necessary to avoid exceeding the 2 degree Celsius "danger threshold" on global temperature rise agreed on in Paris.
There has always been a warning, dating some 20 years or more in the past, when top world scientists, including noted English physicist Stephen Hawking, said that once carbon levels get to a certain point, there is no going back. Hawking called it “runaway global warming." He said he perceived Earth turning into a burning lifeless globe like Venus. He predicted temperatures of 600 degrees or higher.
Heat like that will kill most living things, dry up our oceans, and leave Earth to be another spinning, lifeless rock in the solar system.
Mosbergen quoted Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps Institute CO2 monitoring program, who said carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. He said “even the most rigorous climate action won’t dampen this figure.”
And if we can’t turn off the spigot immediately on carbon emissions, the CO2 numbers, plus the methane gas that is being released by all of the “fracking” for new oil deposits and the melting sea ice, these numbers are only going to go higher. The higher they go the sooner we face our destruction.