Amy Goodman : Climate Change is the Real Deal

This Greenland glacier split in two, sending a 100 sqare mile iceberg floating off into the Arctic Ocean. Image from Mirror, U.K.
News at 11:
How climate change affects you

By Amy Goodman / August 13, 2010

Our daily weather reports, cheerfully presented with flashy graphics and state-of-the-art animation, appear to relay more and more information.

And yet, no matter how glitzy the presentation, a key fact is invariably omitted. Imagine if, after flashing the words "extreme weather" to grab our attention, the reports flashed "global warming." Then we would know not only to wear lighter clothes or carry an umbrella, but that we have to do something about climate change.

I put the question to Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology at Weather Underground, an Internet weather information service. Masters writes a popular blog on weather, and doesn't shy away from linking extreme weather to climate change:

"Heat, heat, heat is the name of the game on planet Earth this year," he told me, as the world is beset with extreme weather events that have caused the death of thousands and the displacement of millions.

Wildfires in Russia have blanketed the country with smoke, exacerbating the hottest summer there in 1,000 years. Torrential rains in Asia have caused massive flooding and deadly landslides in Pakistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and China. An ice shelf in Greenland has broken off, sending an ice island four times the size of Manhattan into the ocean. Droughts threaten Niger and the Sahel.

Masters relates stark statistics:

• 2010 has seen the most national extreme heat records for a single year: 17.
• The past decade was the hottest decade in the historical record.
• The first half of 2010 was the warmest such six-month period in the planet's history.
• The five warmest months in history for the tropical Atlantic have all occurred this year (likely leading to more frequent and severe Atlantic hurricanes).

"We will start seeing more and more years like this year when you get these amazing events that caused tremendous death and destruction," Masters said. "As this extreme weather continues to increase in the coming decades and the population increases, the ability of the international community to respond and provide aid to victims will be stretched to the limit."

Men row a boat carrying supplies while fleeing the flooded village of Karam Pur in Pakistan's Sindh province on August 10, 2010. Photo by Akhtar Soomro / Reuters.
And yet the UN talks aimed at climate change seem poised for collapse.

When the Copenhagen climate talks last December were derailed, with select industrialized nations, led by the United States, offering a "take it or leave it" accord, many developing nations decided to leave it. The so-called Copenhagen Accord is seen as a tepid, nonbinding document that was forced on the poorer countries as a ploy to allow countries like the U.S., Canada, and China to escape the legally binding greenhouse-gas emissions targets of the Kyoto Protocol, which is up for renewal.

Bolivia, for example, is pursuing a more aggressive global agreement on emissions. It's calling for strict, legally binding limits on emissions, rather than the voluntary goals set forth in the Copenhagen Accord. When Bolivia refused to sign on to the accord, the U.S. denied it millions in promised aid money. Bolivia's United Nations ambassador, Pablo Solon, told me: "We said: ‘You can keep your money. We're not fighting for a couple of coins. We are fighting for life.'"

While Bolivia did succeed in passing a UN resolution last month affirming the right to water and sanitation as a human right, a first for the world body, that doesn't change the fact that as Bolivia's glaciers melt as a result of climate change, its water supply is threatened.

Pacific Island nations like Tuvalu may disappear from the planet entirely if sea levels continue to rise, which is another consequence of global warming.

The U.N. climate conference will convene in Cancun, Mexico, in December, where prospects for global consensus with binding commitments seem increasingly unlikely. Ultimately, policy in the United States, the greatest polluter in human history, must be changed. That will come only from people in the United States making the vital connection between our local weather and global climate change. What better way than through the daily drumbeat of the weather forecasts? Meteorologist Jeff Masters defined for me the crux of the problem:

A lot of TV meteorologists are very skeptical that human-caused global climate change is real. They've been seduced by the view pushed by the fossil-fuel industry that humans really aren't responsible ... we're fighting a battle against an enemy that's very well-funded, that's intent on providing disinformation about what the real science says.

It just may take a weatherperson to tell which way the wind blows.

Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.

[Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 800 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.]

Source / Truthdig / CommonDreams

American tourists visiting Red Square wear masks to protect them from Moscow's air, filled with toxic smoke from raging wildfires. Photo by Pavel Golovkin / AP.
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After Copenhagen : Lighting a Candle for Climate Change

Hundreds of climate activists gathered in Copenhagen December 17, in a candlelight vigil. Photo from tcktcktck.org.
After Copenhagen:
Vigils shine a light on emerging movement

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / December 22, 2009

I am writing from the midst of a great winter storm. It is at moments like this that it is hard to convince our kishkes, our innards, that global "warming" is dangerous. That's one of the reasons I insist on talking about "global scorching" -- more honest to the geological reality and more evocative of the emotional reality.

Copenhagen is over: At the official leadership level, it was a dismal failure. At the grassroots level, it brought another stage of growth.

Which narrative controls the future -- top-down failure or grassroots growth -- depends on us.

What went wrong in Copenhagen? The officials came up with a vague agreement among five major nations, no binding decisions, a too slowly approached process toward a too-limited target for even the non-binding decisions, anger among many other nations about both being ignored in the process and short-changed in the results, and a very tentative possible success in beginning the creation of a world fund to aid poor nations make the shift into non-fossil economic development.

Four major culprits: Big Oil and Big Coal, which have blocked effective action by the U.S.; the U.S. government (President and Congress), which has kowtowed to them and failed to commit a serious level of money to meet the needs of poor nations; and the Chinese government, which rejected effective outside verification of its promised cuts in CO2 emissions.

Pressure for deeper commitment, coming from African and Latin American nations and small countries most vulnerable to global scorching through drought and flood, fell short because they had too little power to force the rich and large nations to meet the world's needs.

On the streets in Copenhagen and around the world, however, the summit sparked much more action and much more coherent connection. A true transnational movement is emerging, as will have to happen if the human race is to prevent utter disaster.

In the U.S., attention now turns to the Senate where debate continues on the Kerry-Baker cap-and-trade climate bill and the pressures to water it down. Perhaps most crucial: Will the bill allow the Environmental Protection Administration to establish strong regulations on emitting CO2? If the Senate strips EPA of that power, as some senators are trying to do, it will be better to defeat the bill and get EPA to act.

There will have to be many more people going beyond their own households to address public policy, with much greater effort from those people. In the U.S. especially, climate activists will have to make much closer alliances with health-care, anti-war, and pro-jobs activists if climate healing is to prevail.

One example of grassroots energy that brought together people of different religions and generations: Last Saturday night (12/12), was both the second night of Hanukkah and the night 350.org, a transnational climate-activist network, had urged worldwide candle-lighting vigils to impact Copenhagen.

Around the world, there were more than 3,000 such vigils. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the bitterly cold streets of Copenhagen in night after night of nonviolent demonstrations.

In Philadelphia that evening, about 60 people from various Jewish congregations, some interfaith environmental groups, the local climate-crisis 350.org, and the Philadelphia (high school] Student Union gathered at Independence Hall to light Hanukkah menorahs and other candles as a message to Copenhagen to get serious about a fair, strong, and binding agreement to stop the worsening of the climate crisis.

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center and is co-author of The Tent of Abraham; author of Godwrestling, Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on U.S. public policy.]

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Changing Climate : Denmark Becoming Police State?

Above, a Danish policeman arrests a demonstrator at Copenhagen climate change summit. Photo from AP. Below, detained demonstrators are seen lined up on a street during mass arrests. Photo by Thibault Camus / AP.
Changing winds in Denmark:
Preventive detention and the UN climate conference

By David Rovics / December 15, 2009

COPENHAGEN -- The signs up all over the airport and various places elsewhere in town are calling it Hopenhagen, but everybody I know is calling it Copenhagen, which seems far more appropriate. The international media has been giving this lots of coverage, and rightly so. Of course much of the media is unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, so other things, such as the reason the protests are happening in the first place, can get lost.

Inside the Bella Center lots of stuff is going on. Namely the U.S., Australia and others are leading the way in making sure nothing meaningful takes place there, while many other delegates and activists within try to make the best of it, or at least make the effort to thoroughly expose the bankruptcy of the position taken by the rich countries.

The center itself is divided into floors where the big decisions are being made, and then the rest of the place for the little people, the delegates from unimportant countries like Tuvalu, representatives of small NGOs and other riffraff. Many of the folks involved with the process inside are dividing their time between the meetings and events outside in the streets and at the alternative conference going on elsewhere in town.

Denmark: social democracy to police state?

Copenhagen is a beautiful city. The architecture in the heart of the city is understated but exudes the wealth of a place that was once the capital of a fairly sizeable empire. Of course, though the Danish empire brought some riches home to Copenhagen, the wealth of modern Denmark is far greater, that being the product not so much of empire but of the Danish labor movement and Danish social democracy. It is this check on Danish capitalism that has allowed this wealth to be so impressively distributed, bringing Denmark a quality of life that is the envy of most anyone who knows about it.

Of course, as in any society, there are different forces at work in Denmark. Most Danes would identify much more with those peasants who rebelled in the 17th century and helped pave the way for modern Denmark, not with the soldiers who massacred them, but those soldiers were also Danes. Most Danes would prefer to remember the heroic stories of resistance during the occupation of Denmark in the 1940's, but there were also many enthusiastic collaborators.

At so many points in history there are pivotal moments when things can go different ways, and something pushes events in a certain direction. The direction of social democracy has been the ascendant one in Denmark for quite some time, but this was able to happen for a variety of reasons -- the strength and purpose of the Danish labor movement, the fear on the part of the rich of the specter of communism, the moral bankruptcy of the leaders of society who collaborated with the Nazis after the war, and so on.

If people know anything about this most southerly of the Scandinavian countries they know it's full of windmills. Germany actually has lots more windmills than Denmark, but many of them are made in Denmark anyway, at the Vespas factories in Jutland (where they recently laid off thousands of workers).

There's a reason Denmark has been a pioneer in windmill technology, and it is, to a large extent, the Danish environmental movement. In the early 70's the Danish government was thinking about building its first nuclear reactor, following the example of Sweden, which has one right across the water, upwind.

People inspired by ideas of communal living and experiential learning formed a community centered around a Free School near the little village of Ulfborg and began making plans to build the world's largest windmill. Over the course of three years, working with scientists, artisans and large numbers of hippies, they built the world's largest windmill. They refused to patent any of their ground-breaking technology, making it all available for anybody to use. Their windmill, still standing and providing power to the community 35 years later, is the prototype for the big windmills you'll see scattered around Denmark and the world.

This windmill provided more than just energy -- it and the movement that built it provided political capital. Those in parliament arguing for a nuclear reactor lost the fight, and Denmark became a nation of windmills.

For the past decade or so, however, Denmark has been run by a coalition led by the neoliberal, xenophobic Vestre party. They have been privatizing hospitals and passing some of the most restrictive immigration legislation in the world. They have had troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they have been forcibly deporting refugees back to these war-torn countries.

Fueled by the changes to Danish society wrought by membership in the European Union (EU), this conservative coalition keeps winning elections. Along with a love of capitalism and a fear of foreigners, these people also can't stand hippies or punks or other dissenting elements, and they are on a quest to “normalize” the 900-person intentional community in the heart of Copenhagen known as Christiania. To that end they conducted a police raid early one morning in 2007 and destroyed a house they deemed to have been illegally constructed. (I got my first taste of Danish tear gas there a couple hours later.)

Thousands protest in Copenhagen May 3, 2007, in support of Ungdomshuset youth house. Photo from de.indymedia.
Shortly before this home demolition in Christiania, hundreds of Danish police had landed on the five-story squatted social center known as Ungdomshuset (“Youth House”) by helicopter early one morning. They fumigated the place with tear gas, arrested those inside, jailed them for several months, and proceeded to follow the new government policy of destruction of the house. Masked construction workers from Poland did the dirty work, since Danish unions forbid their members from doing work that requires police protection.

Over the course of the next year and a half, however, the government was forced to backtrack on their plan to "civilize" Denmark. The movement to support Ungdomshuset grew dramatically, involving a number of fairly significant riots and probably more important, a weekly drill of marches every Thursday for a year and a half, involving many hundreds and often thousands every week.

Eventually the chief of police and the mayor of Copenhagen had to admit that their policies had been a mistake and they gave the movement what it was demanding, a new house, bought and paid for by the city. (Left wing foundations had offered to buy a new building for the movement but these offers were refused on principle -- the line was that the government destroyed Ungdomshuset and they should replace it with something comparable.)

In the course of the riots and demonstrations around Ungdomshuset the police preemptively arrested hundreds of people on a few occasions. They weren't technically allowed to do this, but they came up with excuses. One eyewitness told me that the police started arresting people, claiming some of them were throwing rocks at them, although the rock-throwing had clearly started only after the police began arresting the assembled crowd.

Preemptive arrests at climate summit

A new law was passed in preparation for the climate summit which makes this kind of mass preemptive arrest perfectly legal -- all the police need to do is arbitrarily determine that an area is designated as a “riot zone” and then they can arrest whoever they want. Any non-Danes arrested can be held for 40 days (including people who were born in Denmark but are not citizens, a reality for many here that may seem surprising to those in the U.S. reading this). It went into effect a week before last Thursday, and since then the Danish police have carried out mass preemptive arrests that dwarf anything they've done before. They don't even need to pretend they have any justification for what is essentially collective punishment.

Those of you in the United States should be familiar with preemptive mass arrests. If you haven't had your head in the sand for the past few decades then you know this happens regularly at demonstrations throughout our great democracy. But it's new for Denmark, and it is a serious step in the direction of the Americanization, you could say, of the country.

Being an American, I can say first-hand that emulating U.S. policies in the areas of law enforcement or the privatization and outsourcing of industry is all a very bad idea, at least as far as the vast majority of people are concerned -- but the interests of a privileged minority are what moves people like the Danish Prime Minister, not the interests of society as a whole.

Protesters at climate summit. Photo from Monsters and Critics.
The policies and concerns of the new Danish government were represented eloquently by the kettling and mass arrest of a small march that was en route to commit acts of civil disobedience at the docks run by the Maersk corporation. Maersk owner A.P. Mø11er is one of the world's richest men and runs one of the world's biggest shipping companies (look for his name, it's everywhere).

Blockading docks is illegal, of course, and under the normal legal procedures in a democratic society people committing such acts would be told to stop and after a certain amount of time would be arrested, fined, brought to trial or whatever. Yesterday, however, as with the day before, hundreds of people were preemptively arrested, including many who had no intention of committing any illegal acts, such as one reporter for the Times of London.

I narrowly avoided being arrested two days ago. Of those arrested the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with the rock-throwing incident at the stock exchange that apparently set off the police action. The overwhelming majority didn't even know anything had happened at the stock exchange. All they knew was they were suddenly, randomly being arrested while taking part in a permitted march organized in part by the very mainstream Social Democratic Party. This was a family march involving tens of thousands of people with no civil disobedience or other illegal acts planned as part of it.

The new law may allow for mass preemptive arrests, but international treaties which Denmark has signed called the Geneva Conventions outline certain guidelines for the treatment of detainees which were clearly violated by the Danish police. People were handcuffed in uncomfortable positions for many hours on the frozen pavement, not allowed to move, not allowed to go to the toilet. Some fainted, many wet their pants, adding to the danger posed by the freezing temperatures.

Elderly people were arrested along with teenagers. Anne Feeney's husband Juli, a 66-year-old Swede who had been slowly walking beside a carriage, was handcuffed and made to sit on the frozen ground. Among the marchers from Tvind, the Free School movement with whom I was walking, those arrested include headmasters and teachers from throughout Europe and Africa. Every one of the Norwegians I had just been hanging out with the day before from Trondheim were arrested.

I participated in a march that was very quickly thrown together involving several hundred people, starting near the Valby train station and going to the prison to which most detainees had been brought. The police surrounded (escorted?) us and seemed to be thinking about arresting all of us, but apparently ultimately thought better of it. Instead they informed us as we were marching towards the prison that most of those detained had just been released, and that we were welcome to march to the prison but no further.

Outside the prison -- a temporary prison that used to be a brewery -- I heard more stories of how the Anarchist Black Cross representatives who had been attempting to provide soup and solace to people as they were being released were told to leave the premises. When they attempted to set up at the train station a kilometer away they were again told to leave. So as most people left the prison there wasn't even anyone to meet them and tell them where to find the train station. Most detainees were at no point given any food by the police. After six hours some had been given water.

Tonight after Naomi Klein, Lisa Fithian, and others from Climate Justice Action held a meeting at the Big Tent in Christiania, hundreds of police and dozens of police vehicles were involved in more or less laying siege to Christiania, which was defended, as in the past, by hundreds of masked, black-clad young people making burning barricades and throwing large numbers of bottles at the police, who then fired lots of tear gas. Tonight the police reportedly used a water cannon to extinguish the main burning barricade and arrested 200. Most of this happened while Anne Feeney and I were playing a concert in the Opera House, not far from the main entrance.

The future is not written. There was nothing inevitable about Denmark building a nuclear reactor, and because of the environmental movement it built windmills instead. Equally, there is nothing inevitable about Denmark becoming a neoliberal police state. The years ahead in Denmark -- and more broadly in the rest of Europe, run increasingly by pro-business and xenophobic governments -- will determine in which direction things will go. And perhaps the next few days will be a particularly important moment in that process.

[David Rovics is an indie singer-songwriter and political activist.]

Source / AfterDowningStreet

Thanks to David Swanson / The Rag Blog

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