Four Million Join Global #ClimateStrike, with Next Walkout Set for September 27 – The Energy Mix
The image of three climate protesters in Germany, standing at a gallows on blocks of ice in the shadow of Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate, may have been the most searing of the many thousands of images that coursed through online channels, after an estimated four million youth and their supporters took part in at least 2,500 #ClimateStrike events around the world Friday.
Global temperature closing in on 1.5 C limit in global treaty, UN agency reports | CBC News
The
agreement, adopted by almost 200 nations, set a goal of limiting
warming to “well below” a rise of 2 C above pre-industrial times while
“pursuing efforts” for the tougher 1.5 C goal.
A rise of 2 C is expected to wipe out more than 99 per cent of coral reefs and melt most of the sea ice in the Arctic.
“Basically
we are on track to reach at least 1.2 to 1.3 degrees centigrade [above
pre-industrial levels] over the next five years,” Omar Baddour, WMO
senior scientific officer, said in response to a Reuters question at a
Geneva news conference.
Climate change ‘accelerating’, say scientists
Recognizing that global temperatures have risen by 1.1 degrees C since 1850, the paper notes they have gone up by 0.2C between 2011 and 2015.
This is as a result of burgeoning emissions of carbon, with the amount of the gas going into the atmosphere between 2015 and 2019 growing by 20% compared with the previous five years.
Perhaps most worrying of all is the data on sea-level rise.
How Capitalism Torched the Planet by Imploding Into Fascism
OPINION: My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.
Ziya Tong: Mayday! M’aidez! Who can Canadians trust to address the climate crisis?
An emergency in any other context would signal, at minimum, a need for the following: 1) an alarm, or repeated alarms to give notice to the public; 2) an immediate mandate to respective agencies to initiate plans and procedures for an urgent response; and 3) deployment and action of expert teams.
And yet nothing in present-day Canada even hints at the fact that we are in the midst of an emergency. Instead, on June 17, 2019—the day the House of Commons passed a motion declaring a national climate emergency—Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, and Andrew Scheer were all at the Raptors parade in Toronto, cheering and smiling for the cameras rather than tackling the less glitzy job of public policy.
More egregious, though, is that the party leaders of the Liberals, NDP, and Conservatives did not even vote.