Friday, June 10, 2011

THE SKY REALLY IS FALLING

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(The music above is good background for the read.)
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THE SKY REALLY IS FALLING
By Chris Hedges
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter

Originally posted on truthdig.com May 30, 2011
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The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming,
 which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even
 the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago,
 has been confronted by the power elite with two kinds of
self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected
 office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false.
 There are others who accept the science surrounding global
 warming but insist that the human species can adapt.
 Our only salvation—the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry—is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted pied pipers and fools.
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Those who concede that the planet is warming but insist
we can learn to live with it are perhaps more dangerous than
 the buffoons who decide to shut their eyes.
It is horrifying enough that the House of Representatives
 voted 240-184 this spring to defeat a resolution that said that
 “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human
 activities, and poses significant risks for public health and
 welfare.” But it is not much of an alternative to trust those who
 insist we can cope with the effects while continuing
 to burn fossil fuels.
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Horticulturalists are busy planting swamp oaks and sweet gum
 trees all over Chicago to prepare for weather that will soon
 resemble that of Baton Rouge. That would be fine if there was
 a limit to global warming in sight. But without plans to rapidly
 dismantle the fossil fuel industry, something no one in our
 corporate state is contemplating, the heat waves of Baton
 Rouge will be a starting point for a descent that will ultimately
 make cities like Chicago unlivable. The false promise of human
 adaptability to global warming is peddled by the polluters’
 major front group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which
 informed the Environmental Protection Agency that
 “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of
 behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.”
 This bizarre theory of adaptability has been embraced 
by the Obama administration as it prepares to exploit the
 natural resources in the Arctic. Secretary of State Hillary
 Clinton announced recently that melting of sea ice
 “will result in more shipping, fishing and tourism,
 and the possibility to develop newly accessible
 oil and gas reserves.”
 Now that’s something to look forward to.
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“It is good that at least those guys are taking it seriously,
 far more seriously than the federal government is taking it,”
 said the author and environmental activist Bill McKibben of
 the efforts in cities such as Chicago to begin to adapt to
 warmer temperatures. “At least they understand that they
 have some kind of problem coming at them. But they are
 working off the science of five or six years ago, which is still
 kind of the official science that the International Climate
 Change negotiations are working off of. They haven’t begun to
 internalize the idea that the science has shifted sharply. We are
 no longer talking about a long, slow, gradual, linear warming,
 but something that is coming much more quickly and violently.
 Seven or eight years ago it made sense to talk about putting
 permeable concrete on the streets. Now what we are coming to
 realize is that the most important adaptation we can do is to
 stop putting carbon in the atmosphere. If we don’t, we are
 going to produce temperature rises so high that there is 
no adapting to them.”
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The Earth has already begun to react to our hubris.
 Freak weather unleashed deadly tornados in Joplin, Mo. and
 Tuscaloosa, Ala. It has triggered wildfires that have engulfed
 large tracts in California, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas.
 It has brought severe droughts to the Southwest, parts of
 China and the Amazon. It has caused massive flooding along
 the Mississippi as well as in Australia, New Zealand, China
 and Pakistan. It is killing off the fish stocks in the oceans and
 obliterating the polar ice caps. Steadily rising sea levels will
 eventually submerge coastal cities, islands and some countries.
 These disturbing weather patterns presage a world
 where it will be harder and harder to sustain human life.
 Massive human migrations, which have already begun, will
 create chaos and violence. India is building a 4,000-kilometer
 fence along its border with Bangladesh to, in part, hold back
 the refugees who will flee if Bangladesh is submerged. There
 are mounting food shortages and sharp price increases in basic
 staples such as wheat as weather patterns disrupt crop
 production. The failed grain harvests in Russia, China and
 Australia, along with the death of the winter wheat crop in
 Texas, have, as McKibben points out, been exacerbated by the
 inability of Midwestern farmers to plant corn in water-logged
 fields. These portents of an angry Gaia are nothing compared
 to what will follow if we do not swiftly act.
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“We are going to have to adapt a good deal,” said McKibben,
 with whom I spoke by phone from his home in Vermont.
“It is going to be a century that calls for being resilient and
 durable. Most of that adaptation is going to take the form of
 economies getting smaller and lower to the ground, local food,
 local energy, things like that. But that alone won’t do it,
 because the scale of change we are now talking about is so
 great that no one can adapt to it. Temperatures have gone up
 one degree so far and that has been enough to melt the Arctic.
 If we let it go up three or four degrees, the rule of thumb the
 agronomists go by is every degree Celsius of temperature rise
 represents about a 10 percent reduction in grain yields.
 If we let it go up three or four degrees we are really not talking about a planet that can support a civilization anything like the one we’ve got." 

There's much more....read the entire article here:
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_sky_really_is_falling_20110530/
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