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Heart of rainforest,
‘O Amazon!
MELBOURNE – Native forests need wildlife to thrive. We “wise apes” need native forests to save us from the man-made climate crisis. If we lose those forests, we die.
At the recent twenty-sixth climate talks in Glasgow, the world’s leaders refused pleas by environmental groups and forest biologists to protect earth’s best climate stabilisers, its native forests. Instead, the world’s negotiators delayed an agreement greenlighting another decade of forest plunder.
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GLASGOW – Old-growth forests are the planet’s largest and most carbon-rich biodiverse assemblages. Protecting these earthly temples is central to the survival of all life.
As the twenty-sixth United Nations climate talks get underway, the only issue that matters to Mother Earth and the two million known species is, how to slow down the infernal man-made climate heat, climate droughts, climate fires, climate floods and strengthening climate hurricanes and climate cyclones?
The answer is really quite simple. Reduce combustion emissions immediately. Dovetail all industries to produce a zero-combustion global economy by 2035. And end all fossil fuel subsidies, $5.9 trillion annually, without any further delay.
LONDON – A recent British study, which included ten thousand Gen Zs (under 26s) from ten countries, revealed they are anxious and that governments have betrayed them.
Moreover, they are “incredibly worried” about the climate catastrophe. Fifty-six hundred of the ten thousand respondents concluded that humanity is doomed.
One 16-year-old wrote: “For us [young people] the destruction of the planet is personal.”
It’s personal for all of us, surely?
Turning despair into action is the antidote for the Gen Zs and the gray heads, too.
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The heat from fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion stored within the oceans (equivalent to dropping five Hiroshima atomic bombs every five seconds nonstop) is supercharging these god-awful climate hurricanes and climate fires.
Image credit: Luis Guillermo Ferrebus/AP
Today, tropical storms are rapidly intensifying into hurricanes and typhoons. In addition, global heating is slowing down these tempests, which means they have become more torrential, violent and deadly.
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From climate fires and insect epidemics to megadroughts and climate hurricanes, man-made global heating is terrifying! All hands on deck.
This Monday evening, satellite data from Hurricane Eta revealed sustained winds of 190 mph (306 kph) at its core. This climate hurricane in the North Atlantic was the strongest storm so far recorded, and the only Category 5 hurricane ever to form in the Atlantic during November.
On Tuesday, Eta delivered an unsurvivable 21-foot (6.4 m) storm surge to northern Nicaragua and southern Honduras. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), nearly 500,000 children (Gen Zs) were in danger of becoming climate refugees.
Meanwhile, Eta has left the ravaged landfall and is drawing energy from the warm Caribbean Sea while moving slowly northeast towards the Florida Keys.
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Nestled along 500 miles of Alaska’s verdant Inside Passage there are spellbinding skyscraper Sitka spruce, giant western hemlocks, colossal western redcedars and weathered 1,800-year-old yellow cedars. The hallowed old-growth temperate rainforest is ruled by the monarchs of nature, three-quarter ton grizzly bears. Altogether, some 17 million dripping, breathing, climate-making Mother Earth forested acres are guarding a whopping eight percent of all the carbon held in the United States. The Tongass National Forest is America’s Amazon rainforest. It contains about one-third of the sanctified old-growth temperate forests left on our man-besieged planet. That priceless rainforest is every American (and planetary) Gen Zs birthright, and Donald J. Trump, the chief promoter of extinction, has just signed off on the death warrants for more than half of it, some 9 million acres.
Image Credit: Reddit
* As I’m writing, the air is putrid and acrid. A fog of death has cloaked Washington, Oregon and California. Climate fires have incinerated about five million acres – a once-in-a-generation-event – and they are far from over.
The enormity and ferocity of these man-made, global heating fires is gobsmacking. The climate has reached a planetary tipping point. The only unknown is how we survive it – especially with Republicans intoxicated on Trumpism, recklessly reassured by Rupert Murdoch’s science-denying talking heads.
*My upcoming book Gen Z Emergency has chronicled the hideous 2019-2020, worst-ever, Australian climate fires. More than one billion of our brethren and sistren, the animals, were cremated. This does not include frogs and insects, which would have elevated that number into several billions.
*June was the hottest month ever recorded. At the G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, U.S. President Donald Trump refused to sign a joint statement by the other 19 members on combating Man-made global heating. In the meantime, baking, starving and flooding are accelerating globally with vengeance.
Last week, France recorded its all-time hottest temperature, 114.6F (45.9C). Scientists reported that the recent European heatwave was at least five times more likely and 7.2F (4C) hotter due to global heating from burning planet-destroying fossil fuels. Keep Reading
*The Great Barrier Reef and the Salish Sea have been thrown under the bus by Prime Ministers Scott Morrison and Justin Trudeau, Australia and Canada respectively, for more global heating subsidized fossil fuels.
What can be done to protect our only home from roasting to death?
It’s so hot that more starving Russian polar bears are entering into towns hundreds of miles away from the sea. On Monday, another heartbreaking report of a climate refugee with its paws caked in mud, emaciated, exhausted and frantically searching the streets of Norilsk, Russia, for food.
*Earth is roasting right before our very eyes.
The heatwaves in Siberia and Lapland have begun with fury, again. Alaska recorded its hottest spring on record. It’s warming at 2.2C (3.96F), or, twice that of continental United States.
The more fossil fuels burned, the faster the globe heats. That means less polar ice and more global heating methane and laughing gas from the thawing soils. A deadly feedback loop.
At the melting North Pole, researchers have linked Man-made heat from fossil fuel combustion with the jet stream’s erratic sinuous behavior.
*Nature is in crisis. Ladies and gentlemen, our only home is under utter siege by a handful of powerful, greedy, deranged men.
Accelerating fossil fuel heat has baked the Arctic. That pole is the warmest it has been in at least 10,000 years. In 2018, fossil fuels infused the equivalent heat into the oceans of detonating 100 million Hiroshima-style bombs. As a result, the Gray whales of northern California are starving to death. Keep Reading
*Millennials and Generation Zs are terrified. The accelerating combustion of fossil fuels, the Man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction and the annual 250 billion metric tons of Man-made long-lasting poisons have compromised all life.
The youth of the planet are not sitting back quietly. They are forming peaceful movements. For example, Greta Thunberg, a teenaged Swede, began striking against school to bring attention to the climate crisis. Her actions have spawned a global outcry. Hundreds of thousands of school children from around the globe are striking for the climate. Keep Reading
*For more than a month, higher temperatures, longer lasting heatwaves and prolonged droughts have smothered much of the Australian continent. The Man-made climate crisis is smashing into the Man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction. Hideous biological annihilation.
2018 was the hottest year ever recorded in the oceans. Every year in the last decade was among the 10warmest ever measured. The oceans drive Earth’s climate. 93 percent of all fossil fuel heat has been stored in the oceans. The ocean heat is in lockstep with accelerating fossil fuel emissions. In 2018 alone, the oceans absorbed the equivalent fossil fuel heat of detonating 100 million Hiroshima-style bombs.
Terrifying.
Since 1850 and the inception of continuous record keeping, the hottest four years ever recorded were the previous four years. 2019 is predicted to be warmer than 2018. Russia’s oil and gas sales to China are booming. U.S. fracking in west Texas and Alaska are roaring ahead. Australia, too, continues togreenlight new coalmines. The business of planet killing has never been more subsidized nor lucrative for the biggest, wealthiest polluters.
In the meantime, our brethren, the animals, are disappearing 10,000 times faster than the previous five other mass extinctions. Accelerating fossil fuel emissions is cooking the planet alive. Keep Reading
*What happens when the world’s leaders fail to act as empathetic reasonable adults? The children of the Earth are rising to the occasion as sentinels for Nature and their future.
In August, a 15-year-old Swede named Greta Thunberg began a solo climate protest by striking from school. That strike, Strike 4 Climate, has gone global. More than 20,000 students from 272 towns and cities in Australia, Belgium, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. have walked out of class. Keep Reading
*Last week, the National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) approved five permits, or, Incidental Harassment Authorizations (IHC) for oil and gas seismic surveys along much of the Atlantic Seaboard.
It’s the first oil and gas exploration in the U.S. Atlantic in 30 years. The approval, which requires a final consent from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, has hideous consequences for millions of sea creatures.
*According to famed conservationist E.O. Wilson, we have entered the Age of Eremocene, or, the age of loneliness. The whales have gone quiet. The mammals, the birds and the insects have vanished. 138 acres of ancient forests are felled every minute. The Man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction is occurring as much as 10,000 times the rate of the previous five others. Hideous.
*With 150,000 acres scorched and almost 12,000 homes in ruins, the touching animal stories from the Camp Fire in northern California, remind us of gratitude especially for the many intrepid animal rescuers.
Our pets are remarkable friends. Their unconditional love is indeed a treasure trove. Animals are unstinting companions. For some people, pets are their closest family members.
Hundreds of animal rescuers in both the north and the south of the state (which simultaneously experienced the Woolsey Fire) worked ceaselessly to help both domesticated and wild animals affected by the hellacious firestorms.
There are many heartwarming stories arising from California’s most devastating conflagration, the Camp Fire. Allow me to share just a few of them with you.
*Nature is irrefutably exhibiting the unavoidable effects from extracting and combusting fossil fuels: Death. The latest shocking reminder is the record number of fatalities from last week’s northern California firestorms.
In the meantime, the Paris-based International Energy Agency recently projected that by 2025 the U.S. will produce half the global oil and gas from its water-poisoning fracking bonanza.
Here’s what we know: Burning fossil fuels has caused atmospheric oxygen to plummet. Keep Reading
*250,000 Californians from the north and the south are currently evacuated from their communities. At least 48 people are dead with more than 7,000 structures in ruins. It’s five weeks before Christmas and once again firestorms are raging across the Golden State.
Six years of unrelenting drought in tandem with elevated (ocean and air) temperatures are most certainly a deadly combination.
Since 2010, more than 130 million mature trees have perished across the state. Water-starved coniferous trees communicate their plight to bark beetles. The insects deliver the coup de grâce.
In fact, across western North America this is a pattern that’s all too familiar: 30 billion mature dead trees. Instead of removing CO2 and giving off oxygen, gigantic tree graveyards are decomposing and contributing to the overburdened and overheated atmosphere.
No trees. No life.