From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Another sober warning that we are mice preparing for our own drowning is on my desk. The more I read it, the more I laughed as to what politician would dare pay attention. We might be the mice of climate change, but the pols are the rats on a sinking planet.

The Center for Environment and Population, a consortium of university researchers and environmental advocacy groups, last week released a report on how the American lifestyle plays a direct part in climate change. Because of suburban sprawl and its obligatory lawns, malls, and roads, each American in effect takes up 20 percent more land than he or she did 20 years ago. Our world-leading use of household appliances is rising dramatically.

Then there is the nagging habit of humans wanting to live precisely where global warming will hit first. Fifty-three percent of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast, on only 17 percent of the nation’s land. If we are not in pursuit of water, we head for the desert. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing cities in the United States are in arid Arizona, Nevada, or Colorado, and Nevada is our fastest-growing state.

“In response,” the report said, “Americans must make strategic choices both in their individual lives and collectively as a nation - from the local community to national levels - in order to balance the increasing pressures of human activity and their climate change impacts.”

This is the part that is almost a joke: Who will lead by the example of their own individual choices?

Read more Example

From The Seattle Times
By Jim Ayres

The Arctic is home to 4 million people, iconic animals such as polar bears and narwhal whales, and landscapes of stark and stunning beauty. The Arctic has captivated our imagination for hundreds of years, enticed explorers to push for the fabled Northwest Passage and the North Pole, and inspired artists and writers. Though most of us may never set foot in the Arctic, it means something to all of us, both as one of the last wild corners of our world and also as a critical component of the worldwide climate system that drives weather patterns and ocean currents that affect all of us.

The Arctic also is on the front lines of global climate change. It is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet, and that warming threatens people, ecosystems, and ultimately, the planet. The most dramatic evidence of Arctic warming is the rapid loss of sea ice.

While some may herald this sea-ice decline as a boon for further development and new shipping routes, to scientists, it sounds a clear alarm about the imminent and catastrophic dangers of climate change. Recent analyses of ice loss “have scientists saying a global-warming ‘tipping point’ in the Arctic seems to be happening before their eyes” ["Low level of Arctic sea ice indicates a 'tipping point,' Times, News, Aug. 28].

Sea-ice loss accelerates warming of the planet. By changing the reflectance of the Arctic surface from bright ice to much darker ocean, melting ice creates additional warming, which melts more ice, and so on, and so on. Similarly, Arctic warming releases greenhouse gases from carbon that is trapped in frozen soil.

We can still leave our children an Arctic that has vibrant communities and iconic animals, and plays its vital role in regulating world climate. But the warning is clear: we must address global warming on the national level by quickly and decisively reducing our emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Otherwise, we will profoundly alter the planet because the changes now happening in the Arctic will cascade to the rest of the world.

Read more Arctic

From Tom Dispatch
By John Feffer

Being a futurologist means never having to say you’re sorry. Our predictions always come true eventually — or, if they don’t, well, how quickly people forget. Look at Newsweek’s George Will. He predicted that the Berlin Wall would endure, and in an article published on the very day in 1989 that the Germans were tearing it down. That should have been enough to revoke his futurology license and demote him to sports writing. But no, almost three decades later he’s still peering into his crystal ball.

Never apologize, never look back: that’s our motto.

But this time — think of it as the exception that proves the rule — I really screwed up. We all did.

If you look back at the predictions we made in 2008 about the United States and the world, you’ll see just how wrong we were. Today, in 2016, it’s time for a mea culpa on behalf of the profession. Both camps, you see, were wrong. The Chicken Littles who predicted dramatic catastrophe were just as far from the mark as the Panglossian utopians who predicted dramatic change for the better.

Of course we have our excuses. Our minds were clouded by eight years of the Bush administration’s foreign policy — if you can even call it that — which obscured our vision like a stinging sandstorm. In those days, it was natural to believe one of two things. Either the world was going to end with a bang (and soon), or a new administration would come into office in 2009, open up all Washington’s doors and windows, and give the place a good airing out.

No one anticipated what would really happen over the two terms of the Obama administration, even though that’s the job of us futurologists — and I was one of the best paid in the profession.

Where did we go wrong? How could I have been so blind? That’s what I’m going to try my best to explain.

Read more View from 2016

From The Vancouver Sun
By Will Dunham

“Dead zones” in coastal waters — regions of ocean floor so deprived of oxygen that most marine life cannot survive — are spreading worldwide at an alarming pace, scientists said on Thursday.

Driving the trend are nitrogen and phosphorous from chemical agricultural fertilizers that reach coastal waters after flowing off farm fields and into streams and rivers, according to the study published in the journal Science.

Nitrogen compounds from burning fossils fuels, particularly from power plants and cars, also are settling back to the ground and eventually wash into coastal waters, they said.

This decade alone, the number of coastal dead zones has risen by about a third to 405 worldwide, with clusters on the coasts of the United States and Europe. Combined, they take up an area of at least 250,000 square km.

The number of dead zones started to approximately double every 10 years starting in the 1960s, the researchers said. There were 301 such dead zones at the end of the 1990s, 132 at the end of the 1980s, 63 at the end of the 1970s and 39 at the end of the 1960s, Diaz said.

The researchers said dead zones must be considered an important source of stress on marine ecosystems, ranking alongside overfishing, habitat loss from human development and harmful algal blooms as global environmental problems.

Read more Dead Zones

From The Seattle Times
By Joan Crooks and Gregg Small

With $4-a-gallon gas, wars in the Middle East, and accelerating climate change, it’s no wonder we’re seeing bipartisan support for ending our addiction to oil.

Fossil-fuel dependence is already costing too much — draining more than $50 million per day from Washington’s economy as it disrupts our climate, causing more intense floods and forest fires.

Expanding oil drilling isn’t an answer. That’s like treating an addiction by increasing the drug supply. Instead, Washington can become a leader in the transition to a prosperous, sustainable future through the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), a coalition of seven states and four Canadian provinces working to reduce their global-warming pollution and build their clean-energy economies.

The WCI has agreed that a carbon cap — a real, verifiable commitment to reduce global-warming pollution — is the foundation of an economically sound climate policy. It’s the signal the private sector needs in order to invest heavily in solutions. And it’s a sure way to plug the gaping leak in our economic bucket — the billions we spend on fossil-fuel imports — and reinvest the savings in local clean energy and energy efficiency.

In late July, WCI released its draft proposal for a regional carbon cap, but the draft doesn’t yet reflect the high caliber of leadership Gov. Christine Gregoire has shown in championing climate solutions over the past three years.

Read more Climate Solutions

From AlterNet
By Robert Jensen

“The old future’s gone,” John Gorka sings. “We can’t get to there from here.”

That insight from Gorka, one of my favorite singer/songwriters chronicling the complexity of our times, deserves serious reflection. Tonight I want to argue that the way in which we humans have long imagined the future must be rethought, as the scope and depth of the cascading crises we face become painfully clearer day by day.

Put simply: We’re in trouble, on all fronts, and the trouble is wider and deeper than most of us have been willing to acknowledge. We should struggle to build a road on which we can walk through those troubles — if such a road is possible — but I doubt it’s going to look like any path we had previously envisioned, nor is it likely to lead anywhere close to where most of us thought we were going.

Whatever our individual conception of the future, we all should re-evaluate the assumptions on which those conceptions have been based. This is a moment in which we should abandon any political certainties to which we may want to cling. Given humans’ failure to predict the place we find ourselves today, I don’t think that’s such a radical statement. As we stand at the edge of the end of the ability of the ecosystem in which we live to sustain human life as we know it, what kind of hubris would it take to make claims that we can know the future?

It takes the hubris of folks such as biologist Richard Dawkins, who once wrote that “our brains … are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.” Such a statement is a reminder that human egos are typically larger than brains, which emphasizes the dramatic need for a drastic humility.

Read more Delusions

From The Free Press
By Muqtedar Khan

We live in a time when rapid change is the norm. We experience more technological, cultural and political transformation in a decade now, than there was change over centuries in the past. Globalization has put history in a permanent fast forward mode. We will witness significant changes in the next ten years and I hope I can identify the five major drivers of global change.

The challenge of climate change — global warming - is going to have the biggest impact on the planet. It not only threatens the topography of our planet, but it demands that we systematically alter our lifestyle. As we become more and more aware of the dangers of global warming, we will realize that in order to cope with the challenge, we may have to reorganize on a global scale. Perhaps the Federation made famous by Star Trek programs and movies may yet come to pass, albeit to combat climate change and not some alien threat.

Religious fervor is the next biggest threat to the planet. The world is already alert to extremism in the Muslim World. Terrorists acting recklessly in the name of Islam have caused problems across the planet. Muslim extremism has become an important item on the global agenda and has consumed the attention and energies of the United States for the last seven years. But it is important that focus on Muslims should not blind us to religious extremism that is steadily on the rise everywhere.

Hindu extremism in India threatens India’s secular character, undermines its traditions of religious freedom and causes recurring mob violence. Jewish extremism in Israel results in the expansion of settlements on Palestinian lands that is one of the major reasons why peace eludes the region. Extremist discourses from Christians are on the rise in the US. Millions are waiting with anticipation for an Armageddon - a global holy war.

Read more Global Trends

From The NY Times
Editorial

The Bush administration has never masked its distaste for most environmental laws or its ambitions to thwart Congress’s will. Now in its waning months, it is trying to undermine the Endangered Species Act.

This week, the interior secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, proposed a regulatory overhaul of the act that would eliminate the requirement for independent scientific reviews of any project that could harm an endangered species living on federal land.

Instead, federal agencies would decide on their own whether the projects — including construction of highways and dams — pose a threat and then move ahead if they determine there is no problem. Mr. Kempthorne called the changes “narrow.” If these changes are narrow, we hate to think of what he means by broad.

The new regulations would overturn one of the act’s most fundamental provisions. Under current rules, federal agencies are required to submit their plans to either the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Read more Endangered Act

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

About 16 months ago, the United Nations panel on climate change cited a vast and growing divide between rich and poor nations in their ability to withstand the effects of global warming. Other experts described the same problem in graphic terms. “Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic,” Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution told The New York Times. “A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheapest decks were lost. We’ll see the same phenomenon with global warming.”

All governments need to grapple with this problem. “If a government doesn’t react to this,” researcher Susanne Moser of the National Center for Atmospheric Research told the Globe, “it could be considered negligence.”

Michael Glantz, a political scientist who had been warning about the divide for years, was pessimistic that no one would react. “The Third World has been on its own,” he told the Times, “and I think it pretty much will remain on its own.”

And if the fate of his own program is any guide, Glantz was right.

He runs the NCAR’s Center for Capacity Building, which predicts the societal effects of climate change. But because of federal science budget cuts, the NCAR is shutting down the program - which costs $500,000 out of an annual budget of $120 million, according to the Times. Many scientists consider Glantz’s center to be a vanguard effort to put a human face on the potential toll of climate change.

Read more Warming

From The Consortium News
By Brent Budowsky

Anyone can champion the Earth when it’s easy, yet too many remain silent when it’s hard.

The forces behind oil are taking charge in the great energy debate – and the issue of global warming has virtually disappeared from the political campaign, with barely a word from its strongest advocate.

I have supported Al Gore for a generation but am profoundly troubled by his silence and absence from the great debate during this election year.

Gore did not run for President; Gore did not endorse when it mattered; Gore did not push his issues during the primaries; Gore did not challenge the phony gas tax holiday idea; Gore does not challenge the Mother Earth of all flip-flops and sellouts from John McCain, who went from pretending to be a global warming leader to being the great shill for oil company profits.

John McCain is a second-tier Teddy Roosevelt impersonator with zero in common with TR’s championing of the environment, trust-busting attacks on corporate abuses, regulation to prevent children from being poisoned by bad food, and the rights of American workers.

Why is Gore not challenging John McCain visibly, aggressively and clearly?

Why is Gore not challenging the American people to take the hard actions that are needed to conserve energy, to save the planet, and to change the world at such a critical moment?

Read more Al Gore