Climate Change Doesn't Go Away

Vanguard September 2012 p. 9
Bill F.

While the passing of the Labor government’s Carbon Tax bill might have given the government so-called ‘clean air’ on this issue, the latest facts reveal that climate warming and associated extreme weather conditions are accelerating beyond earlier predictions.

James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, published an article in the in the Washington Post in which he declared that “In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

“This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows it is no longer enough to say global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

“Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate, the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

“When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe…

“Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1% to 0.2% of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the past three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10% of the globe.”

Even though there a good initiatives being taken to transition to alternative, non-polluting sources of energy in countries such as Spain, China and even the United States, nothing is allowed to seriously impede the profit-driven expansion of the fossil fuel corporations.

This is because they stand at the core of modern imperialism, the richest and most powerful pillars of US imperialism, in particular. In their interests, the US employs a vast global military force and the CIA directs political and economic interference in sovereign countries, to seize or control oil and gas reserves. Imperialism has to go – it is choking humanity.