Global Warming
-
Beautiful mind, fucked up planet By William Bowles
Lovelock’s contention is simple, in fact so obvious it hardly needs debating: Life, the oceans, the atmosphere/climate and the land are all part of a single self-regulating system that Lovelock calls Gaia after the ancient Egyptian goddess of life. Life maintains the right balance through regulating the type and proportion of gases in our atmosphere,… Continue reading
-
Global Research: Wealth Inequality and the New World Order Selected Articles 11-14 August
14 August, 2009 — Global Research Study: Global warming bill could cost 2.4 million jobs, $1,250 per household – by Mike Sunnucks – 2009-08-14 Troop rise in Afghanistan still option for US: Gates – 2009-08-14 Ex-ISI Chief Says Purpose of New Afghan Intelligence Agency RAMA Is ‘to destabilize Pakistan’ – by Jeremy R. Hammond – Continue reading
-
Book Review: Ecology and Socialism: Inseparable Revolutions
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously urged the world’s workers to unite because they had a world to win, and nothing to lose but their chains. Today, the reality of climate change and worsening environmental breakdowns globally adds a further vital dimension to this strident vision of human liberation. We still have a world to… Continue reading
-
G8 Failure to Launch on Climate Change – Analysis By Stephen Leahy
The G8’s failure to make meaningful commitments on climate last week pushes the world ever closer to global climate catastrophe, experts warn. Without commitments to take action, there is little comfort in G8 countries’ agreement to keep overall global warming below 2.0 degrees Celsius. Continue reading
-
"Getting to the Bottom of Sea-level Rise"
The new projections in sea-level rise, caused by accelerating rates of loss from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica on account of higher global temperatures, even prompted the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Year Book 2009 to warn that important tipping points leading to irreversible changes in major earth systems ‘may already have been reached or… Continue reading
-
The Methane Time Bomb By Steve Connor
24 September, 2008 The Independent The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists. The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Hawking The Technofix – Business As Usual And The Ultimate Genocide
What would a 4C rise mean for the planet? According to the 2006 Stern review on the economics of climate change, up to 300 million people would be affected by coastal flooding annually. Water availability in Southern Africa and the Mediterranean could drop by half, and agricultural yields in Africa may be cut by up… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: ‘Red Herring’ – Al Gore, The Climate Sceptics And The BBC
On October 10, the BBC’s Ten O-Clock News led with the story that a High Court Judge had found nine ‘errors’ in Al Gore’s climate film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, which the UK government has been sending to schools around the country. As a result, by way of ‘balance’, the government will now be required to… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Eating the Planet – Swallowing The Context Of “Earth’s Ecological Debt Crisis”
24 October 2006 — Media Lens The Bland Leading The Bland October 9 saw one of the Independent’s explosive front-page stories on the global environment: “Earth’s ecological debt crisis.” According to a new study, humanity is “putting an intolerable strain on nature”. Martin Hickman, the Independent’s consumer affairs correspondent, explained: Continue reading
-
Media Lens: The Invisible Corporate Shadow
14 September 2006 — Media Lens The Australian social scientist Alex Carey summed up the evolution of political power in the last century as follows: “The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Climate Change– “Welcome to Mars (or North Korea)!”
31 January 2006 — Media Lens The Great Media Silence on Causes and Solutions “One fundamental goal of any well-crafted indoctrination program is to direct attention elsewhere, away from effective power, its roots, and the disguises it assumes.” (Noam Chomsky, ‘Deterring Democracy’, Vintage, 1992, p.303) Continue reading
-
Media Lens: The Point of No Return – Where James Lovelock Meets BP
16 January 2006 — Media Lens Billions Will Die The Independent and the Independent on Sunday (IoS) pride themselves on their environmental coverage. No doubt their editors will indicate today’s dramatic front page as a case in point. The paper depicts the Earth from space overlaid by a dramatic headline: ‘Green guru says: We are Continue reading
-
Media Lens: The Insane Society – Climate Change, Advertising, And The Independent
Fromm concluded that modern Western society was indeed insane and that this insanity threatened the very survival of the human species. If this sounds extreme, consider the media response to the most terrifying threat of our time – global climate catastrophe. In 2004 a paper in the leading science journal Nature warned that, as a… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Burning the Planet for Profit
Mass media, politics, the education system and other realms of public inquiry demonstrate a stunning capacity to focus on what does not really matter. Meanwhile, the truly vital issues receive scant attention to the point of invisibility: the parlous prospects for humanity’s survival and the root causes underlying the global environmental threat. Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Cheerleading the Climate Criminals – Part 2
The Independent – like the Guardian, a newspaper with supposed progressive credentials – noted blandly in a recent editorial that “Global warming is given little coverage by the US media.” (Leader, ‘The American consensus of denial is crumbling,’ August 19, 2005). True enough. But look at our own doorstep; at the wholly inadequate coverage of… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Cheerleading the Climate Criminals – Part 1
Earlier this month, New Scientist reported the astonishing news that the world’s largest frozen peat bog, comprising an area the size of France and Germany combined, was melting. According to researchers who have been studying the permafrost of western Serbia, the bog could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times as… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Is the Earth Really Finished? Countering Despair with the Momentum of Hope
At such a desperate moment in the planet’s history, we could simply throw up our hands in despair, or we could try to reduce the likelihood of the worst predictions coming true. The corporate media has yet to examine its own role in setting up huge obstacles to the latter option of hope. Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Fears for a Finite Planet
According to Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of Business Industry, business is the only route to cleaner water, better healthcare, better education and better roads. “Have I heard that in Davos? Have I hell. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute, and how we have got to help… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 