Almighty GDP Supersedes Climate Code Red, Not For Long

SAN FRANCISCO – This week the United Nations (UN) climate body, the IPCC, issued its sternest warning a ‘climate code red.’ Yet every IPCC decarbonising scenario has GDPs (Gross Domestic Product) rising not falling. The jarring reality is that it’s not possible for civilisation to grow enough food with increasing, intensifying and longer lasting ferocious heatwaves.

Combustion heat from fossil fuels and wood pellets has supercharged the oceans by adding the equivalent heat of detonating 10 Hiroshima atomic bombs every second of the year. The oceans drive the climate, which is becoming terrifyingly unstable.

Climate Change and GDP

Climate fires are raging all over the globe. Siberia is one giant firestorm with untold losses of our brethren and sistren, the animals. Over 40 million acres are charred across Russia’s Northern Asia. For the first time in recorded history the North Pole is blanketed with thick choking climate smoke.

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On Wednesday, August 11, Siracusa, Sicily (Italy), hit 48.8 degrees (120F), the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe. That was just shy of Lytton, British Columbia, Canada’s all-time temperature of 49.6 degrees (121F), set just six weeks earlier. By the way, July 2021 was the world’s hottest month in 142 years of record-keeping.

Climate Change and GDP
Diminishing winter snowpack along the Andes Mountains is a telltale of a man-made runaway climate catastrophe.
Credit: Copernicus

And it gets worse . . .
A gripping megadrought in South America has denied the Andes Mountains much of its winter snowpack. That snowpack supplies spring melt-water to old-growth forests, which subsequently provides drinking water for all cities. Furthermore, a lack of winter snowfall is disastrous news for the drought besieged Amazon rainforest that recently lost a couple billion mature trees due to water starvation and climate fires.

Today’s heatwaves aren’t just breaking records, they are shattering them with horrendous food consequences.

For example, the searing June (2021) heatwave that blanketed southern BC, Idaho, Washington and Oregon broiled many, many millions of pounds of food crops.

Deadly high temperatures hit Canada and US northwest
 — On The Science Show with Robyn Williams

Cherries boiled, from the inside out, on BC and Washington trees. BC lost almost three-quarters of its crop, an economic blow of ~$65 million.

Climate Change and GDP
Heatwaves disfigure apple skin. The scalded apple crops are dumped as waste. Credit: Global News

Four consecutive days with temperatures exceeding 43 degrees (110F) scalded apples and stone fruits disqualifying them from the marketplace. Raspberries, blackberries and strawberries shriveled on the vines while prices at supermarkets across the continent spiked.

Potatoes, wheat and tomatoes also suffered the wrath of an angry Mother Earth. California is in a bind and now America is feeling the bite. California grows 90 percent of America’s canned tomatoes and a third of the world’s. A megadrought across the Golden State has reduced tomato acreages hence the price of this juicy sought after red fruit is soaring. That means the price of pizzas, the most consumed fast food in the nation, are rising. Ketchup lovers, too, are also having to dig deeper into their pockets.

Climate Change and GDP
About half  of Canada’s Breadbasket crops (wheat, barley, oats, peas, lentils, canola, flax & mustard) are drought-ravaged. 
Credit: Google

Elsewhere, droughts lambasting western Canada and North Korea have taken their toll on the mental health of the farmers. It’s so bad in North Korea that dictator, Kim Jong-un, has signaled his country’s pending starvation woes for the winter ahead.

China’s way of contending with the drought is to go dark while focusing on growing its unsustainable economy by 8 percent. China has jailed researchers and shut down agencies that disclose any agricultural information. Meanwhile, China has gone from importing less than six million tons of corn to more than 25 million tons annually.

The world’s leaders are naïve to assume that people will remain docile while global food security comes undone with inferno combustion heat from more subsidised coal minesfracking pipelines and razing old-growth forests for wood pellets.

Climate Change and GDP
Old-growth forests are the Gen Zs (under 26s) lifeline to survive man-made global heating. Without the old-growth, there is no us! Credit: TJ Watt

This much we know, Earth has marvelous time-tested ecosystems that warehouse vast amounts of carbon, often referred to as nature’s, or, natural, climate solutions. They are all so worthy of immediate and total safeguarding!

Instead,  subsidised bottom trawling fisheries are currently unleashing the world’s largest carbon storage as sea floors are smashed to smithereens. This unchecked and accelerating rampage will quickly cook the planet alive. So, terminate that hateful annihilation now!

Climate Change and GDP
Only one percent of Earth’s trees are giants yet they defend 50 percent of all the land carbon. The giants live in old-growth forests, which require total protection from chainsaw massacres. Credit: Reese Halter’s photo of General Sherman, the largest tree on the planet.

Old-growth forests are Earth’s greatest terrestrial carbon storehouses. They supply 90 percent of cities with their daily drinking water. End all logging of old-growth, pronto! 

C’mon UN bring on the Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth of 2010, put forth by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia. If corporations have rights, why shouldn’t old-growth forests, globally?

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Protect all sharks. They are the gatekeepers of the coastal blue carbon zones (seagrass meadows, mangroves, saltwater marshes). Sharks prevent overgrazing of the vegetation that holds 50 percent of all the carbon buried in the ocean sediments. We are slaughtering 100 million sharks each year. Ecocide!

In addition, rewilding the planet is of paramount importance because all ecosystems depend upon rich layers of interdependent biodiversity to function. That means ditching animal agriculture and switching to a water-smart, compassionate and healthy plant-based diet. 

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The Gen Zs cannot reach midcentury with insatiable GDPs that consume at least 1.7 Earth’s worth of resources annually. Instead, it’s time to measure progress by adopting a Citizen Wellbeing metric, which focuses on improving citizens’ mental health, reducing child poverty and addressing the inequalities faced by Indigenous Peoples and all minorities.

“The world needs leaders who care for all its people, who can feel the misery of the dispossessed, who seek power for its use in allaying misery, discrimination and fairness, who celebrate creation and abhor the weapons that make killing easy, who appreciate the beauty of the Earth and diversity of life, and who, while ever vigilant and active against criminality, go out at night to see the stars their forebears saw,” wrote Bob Brown in his eloquent and inspirational book, Planet Earth.

Climate Change and GDP
Reese Halter (l) with Bob Brown (r) at the Birrarung River, Melbourne, Australia. Credit: Paul Thomas

We are facing the most critical window of time in our seven million year history. If the world comes together and dovetails industries, we could attain a zero-combustion economy by 2030. It would be humanity’s greatest accomplishment.

Failure to rapidly respond to this man-made climate catastrophe will give credence to the British Security Service’s (MI5) maxim: “society is just four meals away from anarchy.”

Agitate. Disrupt. Defend.

#OldGrowthBlockades
#ZeroCombustionEconomy2030
#EndFossilFuelSubsidiesNOW
#PlantBasedDiets
#BeeKind
#WalkMore
#GenZEmergency


Reese Halter

Reese Halter is a forest/ocean defender.
His latest book is GenZ Emergency.
Email: HalterBooks@gmail.com for your autographed copy.
In Australia, order from the Bob Brown Foundation by emailing: Contact@BobBrown.org.au

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