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Fixing the Climate Crisis – Part 2

Image by NOAA
Image by NOAA

Fixing the Climate Crisis, Part 2

By Robert Hunziker

How to Fix the Climate Crisis is a multifaceted affair; a National Geographic November 2023 article, The Race to Save the Planet, Can Technology Help Fix the Climate Crisis? that this two-part series is based upon focuses on the nexus of trouble, which is excessive levels of greenhouse gases, specifically CO2. Technologies to fix excessive CO2 in the atmosphere, as mentioned in the National Geographic article, are described herein:

The scope of the CO2 problem is very difficult to comprehend. The planet is big, and any solution involves the entire planet, or it is no solution at all. For example, CO2 disperses evenly throughout the planet. A Marshall Plan solution that bailed out Europe post WWII would simply be way too small. To effectively do the job requires an ultra-massive cooperative effort by nations of the world. In that regard, if the results of 30 years of annual UN climate conferences on climate change, like COP 21 at Paris in 2015, indicate what to expect, then the outlook is bleak. COP agreements over the past 30 years have not been kept by countries of the world, which ignore the biggest risks of all time to life on the planet.

There is no practical way to remove carbon from the atmosphere with enough umph to meet IPCC guidelines without major governments joining together. This is the biggest drag on combating excessive climate change conditions that are well beyond the forces of nature.

In pursuit of the best ways to fix the climate crisis Sam Howe Verhovek, author of Clear the Air/National Geographic visited the intellectual godfather of carbon removal, Klaus Lackner in Tempe, head of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University. Dr. Lackner is experimenting with “mechanical trees,” which he claims are a thousand times more efficient at carbon removal than real trees and better at keeping it stored away. “As an evangelist for direct air capture, Lackner says the key question is not whether the technology works, but what price society will be willing to pay for it.” This has been and remains a major impediment. After all, it’s the biggest project in human history that requires all hands-on deck and trillions of investible funds.

Several nascent carbon removal and capture projects are now active worldwide. One of the largest is Climeworks, a Swiss company that received funding of $650 million from Microsoft, JP Morgan and Stripe. It’s the largest private investment the industry has seen so far. Funders are purchasing “verified offsets” which allows them to claim they’re operating a carbon neutral business. The company builds modular units each the size of a standard shipping container that captures carbon directly out of the air. The containers can be delivered by ship, rail, or truck and interconnected like Lego blocks. The company envisions thousands of units sucking up enough CO2 laced air to remove one megaton (a million metric tons) annually by 2030, 100 megatons/year by 2040, and by 2050 one gigaton (a billion metric tons) annually. For reference purposes, worldwide CO2 emissions in 2022 were 37.5 billion metric tons (GtCo2). According to The World Counts: From 1850 to 2019, 2,400 gigatons of CO2 were emitted by human activity. Around 950 gigatons went into the atmosphere. The rest has been absorbed by oceans and land. It is only too obvious that emissions must be stopped at the source in addition to removal technologies in order to meet IPCC guidelines of halting temperature increases to 2°C above pre-industrial.

Alas, Europe is warming faster than the global average. The mean annual temperature over European land the last decade has been running 2.04°C to 2.10°C warmer than during the pre-industrial period. (Source: Global and European Temperatures, European Environment Agency, June 29, 2023)

The EU is showing the world what to expect at 2°C above pre-industrial, i.e., ecosystems dry-out, including major water reservoirs and major river systems, Rhine, Po, Danube, and Loire nearly dried out in the summer of 2022 with major commercial barges stuck in mud, as over 100 communities in France and Italy ran out of ground water, and of special concern, France’s celebrated nuclear power industry (70% of total electricity) was threatened with shutdowns, and actually down-shifted, because of low water resources, as France for the first time in 40 years became a net importer of electricity (Source: Climate Change, Water Scarcity Jeopardizing French Nuclear Fleet, Balkan Green Energy News, March 24, 2023). This alone should be enough for nations to declare a red alert to stop fossil fuel emissions as soon as practicable, at the least, but no such declaration has been posted. Ironically, the world looks for nuclear reactors to help solve global warming.

Climeworks makes money by selling credits to companies like airlines or oil companies or any company that wants to claim carbon neutrality. At today’s prices to remove carbon, Climeworks revenues in 2050 would surpass Apple’s revenues, but Climeworks expects the price per ton of carbon removal to drop precipitously by 2050, as the market matures.

It remains to be seen if the carbon capture business can successfully scale up to meaningful size fast enough to inhibit what has become the equivalent of a runaway freight train called rapid global warming. To date, carbon capture devices in the world are sucking up 4% of what’s needed to be accomplished by 2030 to be on track to hopefully hold global temperatures down to something that’s livable. Obviously, at only 4% of what’s needed, there does not appear to be a panic-driven movement to come to grips with the biggest threat to life since the last big asteroid collided 65 million years ago (the Academy Award Best Picture nominee Don’t Look Up, Netflix, 2021 deals with this issue).

Meanwhile, deep in the outback of Australia, Aspira DAC, a company that’s a unit of Corporate Carbon, which also sells credits for certified carbon removal, is planning on a massive project of thousands of modules in the barren outback. Funded by Facebook, Google, and Stripe, Aspira is currently building test units the size and shape of a two-person tent with solar panels on either side which provides power for a fan that blows air across a polymer honeycomb device that filters CO2 that’s ultimately released into a collection system. Each module is designed to capture two metric tons of CO2. Aspira believes there could be “a million or two” modules over time. But first, when installations start next year, they are hopeful that the technology will work according to plan.

As mentioned in Part 1 of this two-part series, decades of failed carbon capture projects indicate controlling carbon is far more temperamental than backers let on. Capturing carbon is typically an eight-step process from production of CO2 to burial. At each stage, there’s a potential pitfall. Several major corporations have abandoned carbon capture projects (see Part 1) after spending billions.

Vesta, a San Francisco-based company, is experimenting with finely ground olivine, a magnesium iron silicate found in Earth’s mantle. In water, it absorbs CO2 in a natural chemical process that yields bicarbonates that in turn sequester carbon. If successful, it could bring carbon removal to two-thirds of the planet, the oceans.

A New South Wales company named PhycoHealth is working on an elaborate plan to use seaweed to remove carbon. Pound for pound, seaweed is 40 times more efficient than trees at sequestering carbon. According to PhycoHealth, “if we use the natural infrastructure of the ocean and create large seaweed islands, we could see a dramatic decrease in the main driver of climate change.” The company claims that seaweed has miraculous powers to heal the planet. Still, PhycoHealth, like all companies working on carbon removal, complains about the failure of governments to get involved enough to make a big enough difference. Like all nascent technology companies, government funding will be required to meet the scale of operations.

Another experimental solution bypasses carbon emissions by creating hydrocarbon fuels from nothing but sunlight and the air surrounding us. This is called the holy grail of carbon capture, a project of Aldo Steinfeld at ETH Zurich, Europe’s MIT. Aldo specializes in sustainable energy systems. Using a dodecagonal-shaped collection of mirrored panels the size of a beach umbrella, sunlight is sharply focused into an intense beam that splits CO2 and water into component parts in two separate streams, carbon monoxide, which is carbon dioxide reduction, and hydrogen in one stream, which forms the basis for “solar synfuel” and oxygen vented in the other. Thus, creating solar-synthesized fuel. According to Steinfeld: “The circular economy of it is the beautiful thing… Carbon doesn’t get added to the atmosphere — it’s getting collected and reused.” However, commercialization of Steinfeld’s solar synfuel demands a huge number of expensive solar panels to create a tiny amount of fuel. Once again, the scale of operations is an impediment that’s challenging to overcome. Even though Steinfeld’s energy utopia is possible via solar synfuel, it’s years, if not decades, away.

Paradoxically, the good news about global warming is its universal impact, bringing forward the sharpest minds to find solutions. It is not a hidden monster waiting to spring loose on humanity. We know all about it. The biggest obstacle to fixing the climate crisis is politics that’s been bought (lock, stock, and barrel) by the biggest beneficiaries of fossil fuel production.

According to Al Gore in a recent TED speech: To solve the persistent problem of excessive fossil fuel emissions, he suggests looking at the obstacles, which includes unrelenting opposition by the fossil fuel industry. Even though many people think they are onside and trying to help, he begs to differ: “Let me tell you … on every piece of legislation at every level of government, they’re in there with their lobbyists and revolving door colleagues doing everything possible to slow down progress. They have used fraud on a massive scale; they’ve used falsehoods on an industrial scale, and they’ve used their legacy political and economic networks… to capture the policy-making process.”

Al Gore: “The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. There’s no other way to look at it.”

Yet, as an aside, many climate scientists insist there’s much more at stake than fossil fuels. They claim an equally big issue, maybe more challenging, is too many people living on a finite resource, also known as the human footprint, which is now using 1.75 Earths to exist (Global Footprint Network); the lines crossed into negative territory in 1977. This “experiment” with nature has no historical precedent; none of the prior five extinctions in Earth’s paleoclimatic history happened by intentional abuse, misuse, and destruction of nature’s ecosystems. That’s unique to Homo sapiens. Indeed, it’s doubtful “the experiment” will leave a legacy.
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This article was originally published on November 10, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Note: This article will also be posted on the Facing Future Now! Facebook group. If you would like to comment on this article, please go to the Facebook group and post your comments there under the article posting.

Facing Future Now! https://www.facebook.com/groups/530755592068234
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On the agenda for next week: The COP28 Showdown – An article about what to expect at the most controversial UN climate conference of all time at Expo City, Dubai – The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, more commonly referred to as COP28 from November 30th until December 12th, 2023.

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Fixing the Climate Crisis

Photo by Markus Spiske is licensed by Unsplash
Photo by Markus Spiske is licensed by Unsplash

Fixing the Climate Crisis

By Robert Hunziker

National Geographic’s November 2023 cover story is entitled The Race to Save the Planet. Can Technology Help Fix the Climate Crisis? by Sam Howe Verhovek. This headline puts climate change squarely in crisis mode, and by implication “the race to save the planet” signals the onset of a mad scramble to work our way out of the biggest jam in human history.

It’s hard to find a climate scientist who does not agree with that sentiment. According to the renowned climate scientist Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards, University College London: “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.” (Source: ‘Soon the World Will be Unrecognizable’: Is it Still Possible to Prevent Total Climate Meltdown? The Guardian, July 30, 2022)

In the same spirit of McGuire “telling it like it is,” Verhovek’s National Geographic article makes a profound statement that should be emblazoned on every cell phone in the world and read every day: “Getting to zero carbon emissions won’t save the world. We will need to remove carbon on a massive scale. To do that will require a planet-wide effort to match anything that humankind has ever achieved.”

That is a tall order, a very tall order indeed when consideration is given to how disjointed, at odds, and hateful the world is today. Politics has become a basket case of venomous snakes. Yet, saving the planet requires a coordinated “planet-wide effort to match anything that humankind has ever achieved.” Hmm.

Proposals to save the planet run the gamut from mini-nuclear reactors scattered all over the planet (Oh. please! don’t), carbon capture & sequestration, a trillion planted trees, factory farms replaced by classic agricultural practices (absolutely necessary), soil restoration, geo-engineering schemes to reflect incoming solar radiation, re-freezing the Arctic and much, much more.

Verhovek’s National Geographic article is artistically drafted in the spirit of honesty about the true capability, or not, of climate fixes he found around the world. He traveled to see them. Refreshingly, his approach to the subject matter is brutally honest. There are lots of novel concepts underway that seemingly have potential. But time is of essence and the scale of operations required to get the job done is absolutely staggering, almost beyond imagination. Is it beyond worldwide cooperation?

As of our new 21st century, the planet’s climate system has radically shifted by becoming a hinderance and threat to society in sharp contrast to the past several thousand years of the Holocene not-too-hot, not-to-cold Goldilocks era that supported human existence as a partner in life. Now, unfortunately, global warming has become public enemy number one and a threat to life.

The climate system has rapidly changed because of a deleterious energy imbalance, which is the “proximate cause of global warming” according to Dr. James Hansen, the world’s leading climate scientist. Energy imbalance is the heart and soul of extreme global warming, and it has turned nasty and challenging, a threat to existence.

Energy imbalance or “sunlight in versus sunlight out” is currently running at a rate of 1.36 W/m2 as of the 2020s decade. That is double the 2005-2015 rate of 0.71 W/m2 (Source: James Hansen, Global Warming is Accelerating. Why? Will We Fly Blind? September 14, 2023). W/m2 is “watts per square meter.” According to Dr. Hansen’s description: “There is more energy coming in (absorbed sunlight) than energy going out (heat radiated to space).”

Alas, doubling the rate of energy imbalance within only one decade is not good; in fact, it is horrible, something that causes scientists to unblinkingly stare at the ceiling in the middle of the night. That imbalance is why so many crazy climate disasters have been simultaneously hitting the planet from coast-to-coast and pole-to-pole. The entire climate system is out-of-kilter, topsy-turvy.

Mainstream news has been covering these disaster scenarios extremely well over the past couple of years, as radical climate change struts its stuff for all to see on national TV, major rivers drying up, the Amazon suffering repeated devastating bouts of blistering drought, spontaneous Noah’s Ark floods hitting every continent, massive hurricanes, and Arctic permafrost starting to come apart at the seams across one-quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, exposing decades of recklessly handled industrial toxicants and eons of global warming’s favorite drug CH4 (methane) a “global warming high” that’s to die for.

World news outlets have been so full of disaster scenarios in real time that debate and denial about climate change falls flat on its face; the proof is on the nightly news. For example: “Extreme heat has unleashed rain like never before. Unusually violent downpours have hit every inhabited continent this year. From Storm Daniel in Libya to Typhoon Doksuri in China, the damage has been severe.” (Bloomberg ESG News, Nov. 1, 2023)

What’s to be done?

Can the climate system be fixed?

Today’s broken climate system has been 200+ years in the making, ever since humans first discovered a powerful relationship between industrialization and fossil fuels. And a two-hundred-year-old problem cannot be fixed overnight or within years, maybe decades. The scale of the problem is too big for anything resembling a quick fix.

Complicating matters, the technology that so many optimists are counting on is indeterminate as to scale and proficiency. One of the most celebrated efforts to capture carbon from the atmosphere was recently abandoned. Occidental Petroleum: An Oil Giant Quietly Ditched the World’s Biggest Carbon Capture Plant, Bloomberg News, October 23, 2023. According to Bloomberg: “Occidental Petroleum is leading the global charge to vastly expand the use of technologies that suck up carbon dioxide. The failure of the company’s biggest-ever bet shows the challenges ahead.”

Putting carbon capture into perspective: “After decades of deployment, however, total carbon capture capacity globally is only about 45 million tons of CO2 per year. That’s just 4% of carbon capture needed by 2030 to be on track for net zero by 2050, according to the IEA. And beyond the usefulness of producing more oil, the technology has also been the beneficiary of a decade of policy incentives, including new laws from the US government to increasingly subsidize the burying of CO2.” (Bloomberg, Oct. 23rd)

Century (OXY) now finds itself on a growing list of CCS projects that failed to live up to lofty expectations. Decades of failed projects indicate controlling carbon is far more temperamental than backers let on. Capturing carbon is typically an eight-step process from production of CO2 to burial. At each stage, there’s a potential pitfall: “Examples of misfires abound in the previous generation of CCS. In Mississippi, a much-heralded “clean coal” project at Southern Co.’s Kemper power plant ended up scrapped due to technical problems as costs blew up to $7.5 billion. Chevron Corp. has consistently failed to run its Gorgon CCS plant in Australia as expected after seven years and $2.1 billion invested due to engineering problems around sinking the CO2.” (Bloomberg, Oct. 23rd)

“CCS is ‘a mature technology that’s failed,’ said Bruce Robertson, an energy finance analyst who has studied the top projects globally. ‘Companies are spending billions of dollars on these plants and they’re not working to their metrics.” (Bloomberg, Oct.23, 2023)

With that rather jarring introduction, what does National Geographic have to say about saving the planet?

According to the article: “But what all these efforts have in common is that to their many detractors, the very idea of sucking all this carbon out of the air is a diversion from the far more urgent task of radically cutting carbon dioxide emissions to begin with… More than 500 environmental groups, for instance, have signed a petition urging U.S. and Canadian leaders to ‘abandon the dirty, dangerous might of CCS,’ or carbon capture and storage, a major form of carbon removal. The petition blasts the concept as ‘a dangerous distraction driven by the same big polluters who created the climate emergency.” This criticism is directed at ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others claiming they will clean up the carbon problem. It is believed this same ruse will be front and center at COP28, the UN climate conference, to be held in Dubai, the heartbeat of fossil fuels, in a few weeks.

Verhovek rightfully takes to task the myth perpetuated by the oil and gas industry that carbon can be removed from the atmosphere so they can keep on producing forever. For example, as stated by Al Gore in a recent speech, What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know:  Gore showed a photo of a DAC project in Iceland, one of the originators of carbon removal, which will be enhanced enough in 7 years so that each DAC unit will be able to capture 27 seconds worth of annual emissions There are 8 units. Do the math. Gore’s response: “Are you kidding me!”

On a cost-effective basis, DAC is not credible. Moreover, the biggest obstacle to DAC is physics, CO2 makes up ~0.035% of the air, meaning DACs will vacuum the other 99.96% to get ~0.035% out of the air. Gore’s statement about scale: “Oh, please! It’s a bad joke and cannot possibly meet the scale required just to keep up with current emissions. Meanwhile oil companies are using DAC to effectively gaslight the public.”

Yes, “gaslighting the pubic” as big-big money has entered the scene of carbon removal, Microsoft, JP Morgan and others invested $650 million in Climeworks, the Swiss-based company that has bold, elaborate plans to capture carbon. To be discussed in more detail in part 2 to this article.

According to Sam Verhovek: “But as important as that money is for spurring R&D, it’s a minute fraction of what would ultimately be needed to make a genuine difference in reversing or at least slowing climate change. That figure would likely be measured in trillions of dollars, amounting to one of the largest industrial undertakings in all of history.” Whew!

The End: Fixing the Climate Crisis Part 1

Fixing the Climate Crisis Part 2 – next week: Technological fixes already underway or on deck as described in Verhovek’s article. Hopeful technologies are abundant.
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This article was originally published on November 3, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Note: This article will also be posted on the Facing Future Now! Facebook group. If you would like to comment on this article, please go to the Facebook group and post your comments there under the article posting.

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20,000 Toxic Sites in Sagging Arctic Permafrost

Thawing permafrost in Herschel Island
Photo of thawing permafrost in Herschel Island by Boris Radosavljevic is licensed by CC BY 2.0 DEED

20,000 Toxic Sites in Sagging Arctic Permafrost

By Robert Hunziker

New studies show the Arctic heating up 4-times the overall rate of global warming. This startling rate in one of the most sensitive environments in the world could trigger toxic disasters in up to 20,000 industrial contamination sites.

Twenty-five percent (25%) of the Northern Hemisphere is covered by permafrost that’s melting the fastest ever. The risks of toxic leaks at industrial sites are immeasurable. Nobody really knows for sure how it ends, but it has started.

“Industrial contaminants accumulated in Arctic permafrost regions have been largely neglected in existing climate impact analyses. Here we identify about 4500 industrial sites where potentially hazardous substances are actively handled or stored in the permafrost-dominated regions of the Arctic. Furthermore, we estimate that between 13,000 and 20,000 contaminated sites are related to these industrial sites.” (Source: Moritz Langer, et al, Thawing Permafrost Poses Environmental Threat to Thousands of Sites with Legacy Industrial Contamination, Nature Communications, March 28, 2023)

This percolating threat is starting to become reality as Arctic climate conditions shift into overdrive, heating up like never before. As stated in the Langer study: “The latest data analyses suggesting up to four-fold faster warming, substantially changing the ground stability.”

“Substantially changing the ground stability” is the last thing anybody wants to hear.

Previously, it was thought that the Arctic was warming roughly 2+times faster than the rest of the planet, but this new data suggests 4-fold, which is roughly twice the rate of past warming. It is a shocker with potential to kick-start release of massive amounts of extremely dangerous toxic materials, including radioactive waste, in permafrost throughout the Far North.

“For decades, industrial and economic development of the Arctic assumed that permafrost would serve as a permanent and stable platform: Past industrial practices also assumed that perennially frozen ground would function as long-term containment for solid and liquid industrial waste due to its properties as a hydrological barrier… A number of experiments were conducted in Alaska, Canada, and Russia in which toxic liquids and solids, including radioactive waste, were deliberately placed in permafrost for containment,” Ibid.

“Between 1955 and 1990, the Soviet Union conducted 130 nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere and near surface ocean of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago off the coast of north-west Russia. The tests used 224 separate explosive devices, releasing around 265 megatons of nuclear energy. More than 100 decommissioned nuclear submarines were scuttled in the nearby Kara and Barents seas. While the Russian government has since launched a strategic clean-up plan, the review notes that the area has tested highly for the radioactive substances’ caesium and plutonium, between undersea sediment, vegetation, and ice sheets…The United States’ Camp Century nuclear-powered under-ice research facility in Greenland also produced considerable nuclear and diesel waste. When it was decommissioned in 1967, waste was left in the accumulating ice, which faces a longer-term threat from changes to the Greenland Ice Sheet.” (Source: Rapidly Warming Arctic Could Cause Spread of Nuclear Waste, Undiscovered Viruses and Dangerous Chemicals, New Report Finds, Aberystwyth University, September 30, 2021)

In 2021 the Russian newswire Tass claimed the country was at “the finish line,” removing thousands of tons of radioactive material from the Arctic. However: “Since the 1990s, the Bellona Foundation has been involved in discovering and documenting nuclear hazards and radiation threats in Arctic Russia and based on that experience, the organization asserts that Likhachev’s announcement is untrue — Russia is nowhere near the “finish line” in these efforts.” (Source:  Rosatom Says Nuclear Cleanup in Arctic Done- Far from the Case, Says Bellona, Bellona, June 7, 2023)

The problem may be magnified beyond what’s already known simply because, to date: “There has been no assessment of the environmental impact of these activities on the Arctic as a whole,” Ibid. In other words, nobody really knows what’s happened or what’s happening. This is a new under-researched arena of study that has horns protruding like glistening daggers in the night.

The following research of danger lurking in the Arctic should spook the daylights out of anybody: “Over 110 of Russia’s decommissioned nuclear submarines still have operating nuclear reactors, which, according to Russian designs, means two reactors per vessel or more than 220 individual reactors. There is nowhere to put the liquid waste or to store the spent fuel, so the reactors have to keep operating with only skeleton crews. While, in the past, one country’s failure to safely dispose of its military hardware might rightly have been viewed as its own problem, the case of nuclear submarines cannot be seen in the same light. The proliferation threats these vessels pose is global, due to the large amounts of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium—the key ingredients of nuclear weapons—contained in their fresh and spent fuel. This enormous stockpile of fissile material, which is currently not well protected from theft or diversion, presents an attractive target for a potential proliferator, whether a rogue state or sub-state actor.” (Source: Dismantling Russia’s Nuclear Subs, Arms Control Association, May 19, 2021)

Throughout the Arctic, the issue of what to do for remediation or cleanup is compounded due to the loss of ground stability which limits access to impacted sites and use of heavy equipment. As such, permafrost melt creates a barrier to cleanup. The Langer study found that many former industrial-use facilities are now abandoned and difficult to access.

In the face of clear warnings, the scope of danger is increasing in real time because of new industrial development. There are no international environmental regulations for the Arctic as formulated for the Antarctic in the Madrid Protocol that requires transparent documentation of contamination and potential sources of hazardous substances. However, governance for the Arctic falls under an umbrella organization called PAME (1991) that established an Arctic Council. PAME does delineate environmental issues and shipping issues with a softball approach that does not appear to have teeth for enforcement.

At the same time as scientists uncover more and more risks of toxic materials, the situation is made all the worse because of increased economic interest and commercial development in a less forbidding melting Arctic. But that is merely a ruse as it’s more forbidding than ever before; a melting Arctic is filled with unexpected dangers lurking right around the corner. There is risk of multiple contaminated sites leaking at the same time whilst new industrial development runs amok. Alas, this is starting to look like an exercise in madness at a level of human stupidity seldom witnessed in the history of civilized society. Such situations likely never end well.

Oceana Warns That Irresponsible Industrialization of the Arctic Could Lead to Catastrophic Consequences Worldwide, Oceana – “Protecting the World’s Oceans”:

“This sea ice loss has also opened the Arctic to the immediate threat of rapid industrialization. As Arctic sea ice melts, Arctic waters have become susceptible to new threats of increased industrial fishing, shipping, and oil and gas exploration and development. Increasing human activities could significantly accelerate the threats facing the Arctic, which would have cascading effects all over the world.”

The Norilsk Diesel Tank Incident

The disaster scenario is already playing-out for all to witness: The Norilsk Diesel Tank Incident d/d June 2020: A regional emergency was declared in the city of Norilsk when the supporting posts in the basement of a storage tank of diesel fuel suddenly sank because of cascading permafrost causing 21,000 tonnes of diesel to pour into rivers and lakes in Russia’s Arctic North. President Vladimir Putin declared a state of emergency. Just wondering: How many diesel tanks are located in the Arctic permafrost?

The scope of the Arctic permafrost problem is beyond belief with (1) pesticides like DDT packed in barrels and buried in the permafrost (2) increasing oil leaks by pipelines that stretch throughout the landscape (3) radioactive materials buried around former and current military bases, and (4) deposit reservoirs containing numerous industrial toxicants. Making matters even worse yet, only recently Canada’s massive fires are bringing into focus a whole new dynamic. Wildfires could be sending up plumes of toxicant-laden smoke that spreads across the land and to adjoining countries, like the USA.

Throughout the Arctic, airport runways are sinking, roads are cascading, and buildings are tilting, as some of the most toxic materials known to humankind sit in waiting to be released into the environment because of man-made global warming; once again proving the ancient proverb: “You reap what you sow.” According to Darcy Peter, a permafrost researcher at Woods Hole Research Center: “I’ve heard of dozens of houses falling in, and a few churches. There are multiple graveyards that are falling in, and there’s nothing that anybody can to.” (Eos, June 24, 2020)

Analysts that research and study Arctic permafrost say: “It’s a ticking time bomb.”

As the Arctic fall season of 2023 turns into an icy Arctic winter, which is a shadow of its former self, COP28 is scheduled to be held in Dubai where oil sheiks have taken over control of the science-based UN COP/28 meeting aka: Conference of the Parties for the UN Climate Change Conference starting in a few weeks, late November, when nations of the world and at least 100+ prime ministers and presidents show up for photo ops with Bono to allegedly challenge climate change with 80,000 attendees roaming the decorated halls, similar in many respects to extravagant US auto shows, that presupposes “all will be well, just hang in there, we’ll find solutions.” That would be historic!

Will climate scientists attend?
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This article was originally published on October 27, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Note: This article will also be posted on the Facing Future Now! Facebook group. If you would like to comment on this article, please go to the Facebook group and post your comments there under the article posting.

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Unrelenting Drought Clobbers the Amazon

Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash
Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash

Unrelenting Drought Clobbers the Amazon

By Robert Hunziker

Global warming is consuming vast portions of the planet with a swagger that defies all expectations. Rivers in the Amazon rainforest are drying up. This is not supposed to be happening to such an extent, even during the dry season. After all, it’s a “rainforest” famous for sparkling dew, thick, wet fog with moisture dripping in midair surrounded by an eerie stillness that’s occasionally interrupted by a caw, buzz, shriek, scuttle or click.

“Despite still being in winter, Brazil is expected to record one of the highest temperatures in the world this weekend, comparable to places such as Iran and Iraq. A heat wave has affected all regions of the country, and is mainly causing harm to the Amazon region, which is experiencing one of its driest periods in recent years.” (Source: Heat Wave Turns Amazon States Into ‘Smoke Belt’, The Brazilian Report, September 22, 2023)

Global-warming-enhanced drought has turned into a monster that has battered the Amazon Rainforest every 3-5 years with frequency and severity never before witnessed that puts into question the survivability of large portions of one of the world’s major carbon sinks that’s essential for meeting international targets to limit global warming established at Paris ‘15. Which may already be passé.

According to NASA: “The rainforest doesn’t react like it used to. It does not have enough time between droughts to heal itself and regrow. Throughout all of recorded history, this has never been witnessed.” (Source: Amazon Rainforest is Drying Out. How Much More Abuse Can It Take? DownToEarth, June 29, 2020) That was two years ago; it’s gotten worse.

“In 2021 it was discovered that due to deforestation, parts of the rainforest started emitting more carbon than it held.” (Source: Amazon Deforestation—How much of the Rainforest Is Left? Sentient Media, October 13, 2023)

In only 50 years, twenty percent (20%) of the rainforest has been purposely destroyed. Scientists believe this is uncomfortably close to the “breaking point” when the forest collapses in on itself, transitioning to a scrubby savannah. The worldwide implications are impossible to describe and likely horrifying.

NASA’s GRACE satellite system shows an Amazon in tenuous condition in an unprecedented state of breakdown. GRACE has detected large areas of the Amazon classified as “Deep Red Zones” with severely constrained water levels.

Whereas, elsewhere in the world of normal everyday life people wake up every morning in cities like LA and NYC and Atlanta and Dallas and go about daily routines, the same ole, same ole, hop into a new EV, motor the freeway to an underground parking garage, up an elevator 2o floors to air-conditioned offices for 8 hours and then reverse the process. These people do not live where climate change devastates ecosystems. Urban ecosystems mainly consist of concrete, asphalt, glass, and a sprinkling of flora. What’s to harm other than people? And the reality of an urban resident visualizing a failing rainforest is difficult. In their mind’s eye, a rainforest landscape is like “painting by numbers,” a one-dimensional piece of fine art that only serves to fool the foolish.

S0uth of the equator indigenous tribal people are desperately urging the national government to declare a climate emergency for survival. Life is brutal. Indigenous tribes need government help just to survive. Villages have no drinking water, food, or medicine due to brutal drought that is drying up rivers that are vital to travel in the rainforest. Drought, excessive heat, has killed thousands upon thousands of fish that they depend upon. Rivers have turned into muddy streams.

Brazil is experiencing a more serious version of the unprecedented drought that nearly dried up Europe’s famed rivers like the Rhine, Po, Loire, and Danube in the summer of 2022, demonstrating the overarching reach of this new more pronounced cycle of global warming that’s haunting the planet.

APIAM, an organization that represents 63 tribes, has reached out to the national government for help. After all, the tribes did not emit tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, causing global heat that’s killing flora and fauna, as outsiders illegally burn vast swaths of rainforest to grow crops and raise cattle that’s sent north. Frankly, the north/south juxtaposition demonstrates moronic neocolonialism to an extreme.

“The Rio Negro, Solimoes, Madeira, Jurua, and Purus rivers are drying up at a record pace, and forest fires are destroying the rainforest in new areas in the lower Amazon reaches, APIAM said in a statement.” (Amazon’s Indigenous People Urge Brazil to Declare a National Emergency as Rivers Dry Up, Reuters, October 10, 2023)

“The level of the Rio Negro is dropping by 1 meter (3 feet) every three days, something that has never been recorded before.” (Source: Amazon Drought Cuts River Traffic, Leaves Communities Without Water and Supplies, Mongabay, October 2023)

“The Madeira River to the southwest is no longer navigable in its upper reaches, isolating Indigenous villages and non-Indigenous communities that rely on collecting fruit in the rainforest but cannot move their produce out… the smoke from forest fires is worse than ever, aggravating the climate crisis and affecting the health of the elderly and children. It is not just the El Nino current. Deforestation continues with the fires… The agricultural advance does not stop. They are destroying everything, as if they do not see what is happening to nature,” Ibid. In Amazonas state, nearly 7,000 fires were reported in September alone, the second-highest figure for the month since satellite monitoring began in 1998.

It’s not just indigenous tribes that suffer. Big ag companies Cargill, Bunge, and Amaggi are reducing loads of grains on river barges as a precaution as several got stuck in mud. And the shipping logistics group Moller-Maersk warned customers that navigation to Manaus, the largest Amazonian city, population 2 million, is not possible. Maersk said in a separate statement that severe drought has hit 60 of the 62 municipalities in Amazonas state, temporarily suspending cabotage service to and from Manaus.

“Communities dependent on the Amazon rainforest’s waterways are stranded without supply of fuel, food, or filtered water. Dozens of river dolphins perished and washed up on shore. And thousands of lifeless fish float on the water’s surface. These are just the first grim visions of extreme drought sweeping across Brazil’s Amazon. The historically low water levels have affected hundreds of thousands of people and wildlife and, with experts predicting the drought could last until early 2024, the problems stand to intensify.” (‘Without Water, there is no Life’: Drought in Brazil’s Amazon is Sharpening Fears for the Future, AP News, October 8, 2023)

“Our results show that overall, the Amazon Basin is becoming almost neutral in terms of carbon balance because deforestation, degradation, and the impacts of warming, frequent droughts, and fires over the past two decades release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.” (NASA).

Yet all of humanity depends upon the wonders of the rainforest to absorb and store carbon and release refreshing oxygen as well as its powerful hydrology system, forming clouds and rain that travel as far away as the cornfields of Iowa. But the rainforest is stunted and beaten down onto her knees. This radical, abrupt change of the rainforest clashes with everything that Paris ’15 stands for. Global warming has become public enemy number one.

Will COP28/Dubai, the big UN climate conference of nations coming up soon, do something constructive that helps the once-spectacular Amazon rainforest, or will it continue the well-worn COP tradition of all-talk, no walk?

And when is it too late? Nobody knows. It depends upon whether humans can exist in a sterilized world without nature’s ecosystems for support. The first ever apocalyptic science fiction to depict a sterilized world: The Last Man (1805) by Jean-Baptiste Francois Xavier Cousin de Grainville is more relevant than ever before, 218 years later.

“In the magic mirrors thou beholdest around, the last man will stand revealed to thy sight. There, as on a stage, where the actors represent heroes who are no more, thou shalt hear him converse with the most illustrious personages of the last ages of the world, read in his soul his most secret thoughts and be the witness and judge of his last actions.” (from chapter 1 – The Last Man)

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This article was originally published on October 20, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

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Fukushima Up Close, 13 Years Later

Fukushima nuclear accident. (2023, October 11).
Fukushima nuclear accident (Radiation hotspot in Kashiwa-Image in the public domain)

Fukushima Up Close, 13 Years Later

By Robert Hunziker

The world is turning to nuclear power as a solution to global warming, but it is postulated herein that it is a huge mistake that endangers society. One nuclear meltdown causes as much damage over the long-term as a major war. Moreover, according to Dr. Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, former secretary to the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Internal Radiation: “It’s important to understand that nuclear is very likely to be a significant climate casualty.”

Also, of interest, Google: “France’s Global Warming Predicament,” which discusses nuclear energy’s vulnerability in a global warming world.

Beyond Nuclear International recently published an article about the status of Fukushima as well as an exposé of how the nuclear industry gets away with responsibility for radiation-caused (1) deaths (2) chronic conditions like cancer (3) genetic deformities: A Strategy of Concealment, September 24, 2023, by Kolin Kobayashi, who is a Tokyo-born France-based anti-nuclear activist journalist also serving as president of Echo-Exchange. Kobayashi’s work was posted by CounterPunch under the title: How Agencies That Promote Nuclear Power Are Quietly Managing Its Disaster Narrative.

The following synopsis, including editorial license that adds important death details which defy the nuclear industry’s bogus claims about nuclear safety, opens closed pathways to what’s really going on.

After thirteen years, the declaration of a State of Emergency for Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant still cannot be lifted because of many unknowns, as well as ubiquitous deadly radiation levels. The destroyed reactors are tinderboxes of highly radioactive spent fuel rods that contain more cesium-137 than eighty-five (85) Chernobyls. Cesium-137 in or near a human body erupts into a series of maladies, one after another in short order, depending upon level of exposure: (1) nausea (2) vomiting (3) diarrhea (4) bleeding (5) coma leading to death.

The spent fuel rods at the Fukushima nuclear reactor site are stored in pools of water on the top floor of compromised reactor buildings 100 feet above ground level, except for Unit 3 which completed removal of its spent fuel rods in 2019, an extremely slow, laborious process that’s highly dangerous.

Stored spent fuel rods in open pools of water are the epitome of high-risk. “If the 440 tonne vessel collapses, it could hit the storage pool next to it. If this pool is damaged, even partially, another major disaster could occur.” (Kobayashi) In that regard, there’s significant risk of collapse in the event of a strong earthquake. And Japan is one of the most earthquake prone countries in the world. “The city (Tokyo) government’s experts reckon there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7, or higher, quake hitting the capital within the next 30 years.” (Source: Japan is Preparing for a Massive Earthquake, The Economist, August 31, 2023)

If exposed to open air, spent fuel rods erupt into a sizzling zirconium fire followed by massive radiation bursts of the most toxic material on the planet. It can upend an entire countryside and force evacuation of major cities. According to the widely recognized nuclear expert Paul Blanch: “Continual storage in spent fuel pools is the most unsafe thing you could do.” Paul Blanch, registered professional engineer, US Navy Reactor Operator & Instructor with 55 years of experience with nuclear engineering and regulatory agencies, is widely recognized as one of America’s leading experts on nuclear power.

Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant will remain a high-risk explosive scenario for decades ahead. After all, a program for future decommissioning is unclear and overall radiation guesstimates are formidable. All the structures where decommissioning will take place are highly radioactive and as such nearly impossible for the dangers to worker exposure.

TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) does not yet know the true extent of damage nor the complete dispersion of corium (molten magma from melted nuclear fuel rods in the core of the reactors). Although engineers believe they’ve located the corium in all three crippled units. For example, when unit 1 was surveyed by a robot, images showed many parts of the concrete foundation supporting the pressure vessel severely damaged by intense heat from corium. Corium, which is the product of the meltdown of fuel rods in the core of the reactor, is so hot that “corium lava can melt upwards of 30cm (12 inches) of concrete in 1 hour.” (Source: The Most Dangerous (Man-Made) Lava Flow, Wired, April 10, 2013)

Furthermore, on specific point: Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory created corium at 2000°C in an experiment. The experiment demonstrated that “cooling with water may not be sufficient” to halt damaging aspects of corium to concrete. According to the Argonne experiment: “One thing to remember — much of the melting of concrete during a meltdown occurs within minutes to hours, so keeping the core cool is vital for stopping the corium from breaching that containment vessel.”

In the case of Fukushima, TEPCO claims the corium did not breach the outer wall of the containment vessels, “although there is a healthy debate about this,” Ibid. Still, an open question remains. The crippled reactors are so hot with radiation that it’s nearly impossible to fully know what’s happening. Dangers of corium: “Long after the meltdown, the lava constituting the corium will remain highly dangerously radioactive for decades-to-centuries.” (Wired)

Regarding the decision to start releasing radioactive water from storage tanks at Fukushima, which water accumulates daily for purposes of keeping the hot stuff from igniting into an indeterminate fireball, the decision to release was approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency: “The IAEA does not have the scientific authority to make reference to the ecological impact of this water discharge, nor has it carried out such a long-term assessment. It is more of a political decision than a scientific one.” (Kobayashi)

Radiation Risks to Society

According to the World Nuclear Association, there were no fatalities due to radiation exposure at Fukushima. And as recently as 2021, Forbes magazine reported No one Died From Radiation At Fukushima: IAEA Boss. It is believed this is a lie and part of a massive coverup.

According to Green Cross (founded in 1993 by Mikhail Gorbachev, who repeatedly spoke out about interrelated threats humanity and our Earth confront from nuclear arms, chemical weapons, unsustainable development, and the human-induced decimation of the planet’s ecology): “Approximately 32 million people in Japan are affected by the radioactive fallout from the nuclear disaster in Fukushima… This includes people who were exposed to radiation and other stress factors resulting from the accident and who are consequently at potential risk from both long and short-term consequences… As with the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which impacted 10 million people, Japan is expected to see increased cancer risk and neuropsychological long-term health consequences.”

With nuclear radiation, the damage to humans shows up years later as cancer and/or deformity of newborns second/third generation. For example, only recently, the truth has come to surface about Chernobyl-related deaths, child deformities, and cancer 30+ years after the event. For example:

* A BBC Future Planet article d/d July 25, 2019, The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster: “According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure… Brown’s research, however, suggests Chernobyl has cast a far longer shadow.”

* “The number of deaths in subsequent decades remains in dispute. The lowest estimates are 4,000; others 90,000 and up to 200,000.” (Source: Janata Weekly: Cuba and the Children of Chernobyl, May 7, 2023)

* According to an article in USA Today d/d February 24, 2022, What Happened at Chernobyl? What to Know About Nuclear Disaster: “At least 28 people were killed by the disaster, but thousands more have died from cancer as a result of radiation that spread after the explosion and fire. The effects of radiation on the environment and humans is still being studied.”

According to Chernobyl Children International, 6,000 newborns are born every year in Ukraine with congenital heart defects called “Chernobyl Heart.”

Fukushima Report: The stress-related effects of Fukushima evacuation and subsequent relocation are also a concern. The evacuation involved a total of over 400,000 individuals, 160,000 of them from within 20km of Fukushima. The number of deaths from the nuclear disaster attributed to stress, fatigue and the hardship of living as evacuees is estimated to be around 1,700 so far. (Source; Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant Disaster: How Many People Were Affected? 2015 Report, Reliefweb, March 9, 2015.

The Fukushima Report was prepared under the direction of Prof. Jonathan M. Samet, Director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Southern California (USC), as a Green Cross initiative. Green Cross International: GCI is an independent non-profit and nongovernmental organization founded in 1993 by Nobel Peace Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev.

Over time, Japan is expected to see increased cancer risks and neuropsychological long-term health consequences. “The lives of approximately 42 million people have been permanently affected by radioactive contamination caused by the accidents in the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants. Continued exposure to low-level radiation, entering the human body on a daily basis through food intake, is of particular consequence,” Ibid.

Fukushima Deaths

The cocksure pro-nuclear crowd has trumpeted Fukushima as an example of Mother Nature taking lives because of an earthquake and tsunami; whereas the power plant accident proves nuclear power can withstand the worst without unnecessary death and illness. According to nuclear industry reports, all the deaths (16,000) were the fault of Mother Nature, not radiation.

But people in the streets and on the ground in Japan tell a different story about the risks of radiation. They talk about illnesses and death. TEPCO itself has reported few radiation illnesses and no radiation-caused deaths but what if it’s not their responsibility in the first instance, as layers of contractors and subcontractors employ workers to cleanup the toxic mess. If “subcontractor workers die” from radiation exposure, so what? It’s not TEPCO’s responsibility to report worker deaths of subcontractors, and the subcontractors are not motivated to report deaths, which are not reported.

According to credible sources in Japan, death is in the air, to wit: “The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed, and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains. They were simply labeled ‘decontamination troops’ — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside… Hideaki Kinoshita, a Buddhist monk… keeps the unidentified laborers’ ashes at his temple, in wooden boxes and wrapped in white cloth.” (Source: Mari Yamaguchi, Fukushima ‘Decontamination Troops’ Often Exploited, Shunned, AP & ABC News, Minamisoma, Japan, Mar 10, 2016)

“The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close family ties — tasked with removing the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine… Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers make up the very bottom of the nation’s murky, caste-like subcontractor system long criticized for labor violations,” Ibid.

The following is part of an interview with Katsutaka Idogawa, former mayor of Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture. (Source: Fukushima Disaster: Tokyo Hides Truth as Children Die, Become Ill from Radiation – Ex-Mayor, RT, April 21, 2014):

SS (question): The United Nations report on the radiation fallout from Fukushima says no radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed – so it’s not that dangerous after all? Or is there not enough information available to make proper assessments? What do you think?

Katslutaka Idogawa’s response: “This report is completely false. The report was made by a representative of Japan – Professor Hayano. Representing Japan, he lied to the whole world. When I was mayor, I knew many people who died from a heart attack, and then there were many people in Fukushima who died suddenly, even among young people. It’s a real shame that the authorities hide the truth from the whole world, from the UN. We need to admit that actually many people are dying. We are not allowed to say that, but TEPCO employees also are dying. But they keep mum about it.”

Mako Oshidori, interviewed in Germany, director of Free Press Corporation/Japan, investigated several unreported worker deaths, and interviewed a former nurse who quit TEPCO: “I would like to talk about my interview of a nurse who used to work at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) after the accident… He quit his job with TEPCO in 2013, and that’s when I interviewed him… As of now, there are multiple NPP workers that have died, but only the ones who died on the job are reported publicly. Some of them have died suddenly while off work, for instance, during the weekend or in their sleep, but none of their deaths are reported.” (Oshidori)

“Not only that, but they are also not included in the worker death count. For example, there are some workers who quit the job after a lot of radiation exposure… and end up dying a month later, but none of these deaths are either reported, or included in the death toll. This is the reality of the NPP workers.” (Oshidori)

During her interview, Ms. Oshidori commented, “There is one thing that really surprised me here in Europe. It’s the fact that people here think Japan is a very democratic and free country.”

Mako’s full interview “The Hidden Truth about Fukushima”

Alas, two hundred U.S. sailors of the USS Ronald Reagan filed a lawsuit against TEPCO, claiming that they experienced leukemia, ulcers, gall bladder removals, brain cancer, brain tumors, testicular cancer, dysfunctional uterine bleeding, thyroid illness, stomach ailments and other complaints extremely unusual in such young adults. One sailor died from radiation complications. Among the plaintiffs was a sailor who was pregnant during the mission. Her baby was born with multiple genetic mutations.

The sailors that filed the suit participated in “Operation Tomodachi,” providing humanitarian relief after the March 11th, 2011 Fukushima disaster based upon assurances that radiation levels were okay. But that was a lie.

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the sailors’ appeal.

In summation, the final word is left to Kolin Kobaryashi: “The international nuclear lobby, which represents only a minority, has the influence and money to dominate the world’s population with immense power and has now united the world’s minority nuclear community into one big galaxy. Many of the citizens who have experienced the world’s three most serious civil nuclear accidents have clearly realized that nuclear energy is too dangerous. These citizens are so divided and conflicted that they feel like a helpless minority.”

“Former prime ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Naoto Kan called on the European Union on Thursday to pursue a path toward zero nuclear power, with the bloc planning to designate it as a form of “green” energy in achieving net-zero emissions by midcentury.” (Source: Ex-Prime Ministers Koizumi and Kan Demand EU Choose Zero Nuclear Power Path, The Japan Times, Jan. 27, 2022)

“Five former Japanese prime ministers issued declarations that Japan should break with nuclear power generation on March 11, the 10th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that triggered a nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture… Former prime ministers Morihiro Hosokawa, Tomiichi Murayama, Junichiro Koizumi, Yukio Hatoyama and Naoto Kan signed and released their declarations during the conference. Among them, Koizumi, Hatoyama and Kan took to the podium and shook hands… In his declaration titled ‘Don’t hold back on reversing a mistake: A zero-carbon emission society can be achieved without nuclear power plants,’ Koizumi said, ‘When it comes to the nuclear power plant issue, there is no ruling party or opposition party. Nuclear power plants expose many people’s lives to danger, bring financial ruin, and cause impossible-to-solve nuclear waste problems. We have no choice but to abolish them.” (Source: 5 ex-Japan PMs Call for Country to End Nuclear Power Use on Fukushima 10th Anniversary, The Mainichi, March 12, 2021)

Japan PM Kishida Orders New Nuclear Power Plant Construction, Nikkei Asia, August 24, 2022.
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This article was originally published on October 13, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Note: This article will also be posted on the Facing Future Now! Facebook group. If you would like to comment on this article, please go to the Facebook group and post your comments there under the article posting.

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Antarctica’s Dicey Summer

Photo by Sophia Simoes on Unsplash
Photo by Sophia Simoes on Unsplash

Antarctica’s Dicey Summer

By Robert Hunziker

The past couple of years in Antarctica have been a rough and tumble affair of erratic climate change with record-high temperatures and totally unexpected ice shelf collapse. The continent is starting to reflect the impact of a warming planet that’s just too hot for icy comfort. So, what surprises will this year’s summer season bring?

At the tail end of Antarctica’s 2022 summer, during the start of autumn/March ‘22, temperatures along the eastern coast spiked 70°F (39°C) above normal. Scientists called it “unthinkable.” According to Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington: “We found that temperature anomaly, the 39-degree temperature anomaly, that’s the largest anywhere ever measured anywhere in the world.” (Source: Scientists Found the Most Intense Heat Wave Ever Recorded – in Antarctica, The Washington Post, September 24, 2023)

Within weeks, the unthinkable happened in East Antarctica. Conger Ice Shelf suddenly collapsed. According to NASA: “It is relatively common for ice shelves in Antarctica to spawn icebergs, it is less common for an ice shelf to completely disintegrate. The collapse has reshaped a part of the Antarctic landscape where coastal glacial ice was once thought to be stable. The change happened fast… All of the previous collapses have taken place in West Antarctica, not East Antarctica, which until recently has been thought of as relatively stable. This is something like a dress rehearsal for what we could expect from other, more massive ice shelves if they continue to melt and destabilize. Then we’ll really be past the turnaround point in terms of slowing sea level rise” (Source: Ice Shelf Collapse in East Antarctica, Earth Observatory, NASA, March 29, 2022).

Antarctica’s upcoming summer of 2023 with sunshine 24/7 from October thru February will bring a new season that is especially notable considering the fact that global warming strutted its stuff during Antarctica’s dark winter months of March-to-October 2023, setting new high temperature records and especially true of global warming’s impact on abnormally high ocean temperatures, which serve to undercut and weaken ice shelves: “The Southern Ocean has warmed substantially.” (Source: Southern Ocean Warming and its Climatic Impacts, Science Bulletin, Vol. 68, Issue 9, May 15, 2023) thus creating higher risks for 90% of the world’s surface water that’s impermanently locked in ice.

Already, strange things may be happening. For example, according to a non-authoritative source, the crucial Pinning Point 5 is gone at Thwaites/Pine Island glaciers. That source claims this risks an acceleration of glacial flow and termed the occurrence ‘”an emergency,” but that has not been verified by other sources. It should be noted that the source has a reasonable track record of following Antarctic events that later make news. (Source: Pinning Point Five Collapsed, the Sea Ice Barrier Buttressing Thwaites and Pine Island Glacier, Daily Kos, Sept. 29, 2023)

Along the way, the erratic behavior of the climate system over the past 18-24 months is of major concern, as global heat has enveloped the planet, setting records from the peaks of the tallest mountains in the Alps to the deepest interior of Antarctica, almost as if the climate system is programmed to keep turning up the thermostat, regardless of location, regardless of time, whatever season. Of course, this is as threatening to survival of Antarctica’s icy stature as it is fatal to the world’s coastal cities.

Polar Amplification in Antarctica

Times are changing fast as Antarctica, like its cousin up north, heats up much faster than the rest of the planet. According to Dr. Mathieu Casado, Laboratoire des Science du Climat et de l’Environment/France, there is direct evidence that Antarctica is undergoing “polar amplification.” (Source: Ice Cores Reveal Antarctica is Warming Twice as Fast as Global Average, CarbonBrief, September 13, 2023)

In plain English, it’s heating up much faster than the overall planet, which is horribly threatening news. In fact, the study found the continent is heating up per decade as much as 50% over climate models. This is a shocker to climate scientists and should be of serious concern to any sane/grounded person. It speaks to the necessity of taking immediate action by nation/states to convert energy systems to renewables.

According to the Casado study, Antarctica’s warming “is almost twice as strong as global warming estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) … also 20-50% larger than the estimates from the climate models used to produce the IPCC reports -even in East Antarctica, which was believed to be largely unaffected by climate change so far.” Accordingly, the study anticipates “dire consequences for the low-lying lands… further warning of the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, even in one of the most remote parts of the world.”

Therefore, sea level rise as currently anticipated by consensus opinion is very likely too low in terms of potential and resultant coastal impacts, including calculations used by the IPCC, underestimating global warming’s impact on Antarctica by a wide margin.

It is instructive to look at the latest IPCC report, which is a synthesis d/d March 2023 that integrates the findings from its Sixth Assessment Report Cycle, stating: “Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying… There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all. Choices made this current decade will impact us now and for thousands of years.” (Source: IPCC Climate Change Reports: Why They Matter to Everyone on the Planet, National Resources Defense Council, April 14, 2023) Thus, the IPCC puts the decade of the 2020s on a pedestal of achievement that must be achieved, or it’ll crash.

According to the IPCC’s Best-Case analysis: “If the world bands together to slash emissions immediately, the world can avoid the most catastrophic version of the climate crisis, but it will continue to warm until at least mid-century, due to the impact of past emissions.” For example, some changes that are already set in motion, like sea level rise, are irreversible over many decades. Adaptation is necessary.

In point of fact, the Casado study adds a haunting new perspective to the 6th Assessment Report, i.e., Antarctica’s warming is almost twice as strong as stated by the IPCC. In the final analysis, the study means the IPCC vastly understates the impact of global warming on Antarctica, which can only mean that low-lying coastal cities should build massive sea walls.

After all, according to the Miami Herald regarding southern Florida, within the next couple of years:  Some Keys Roads Will Flood by 2025 Due to Sea Rise, Fixing Them Could Cost $750 Million, Miami Herald, Oct. 21, 2021.

And this: “Several parts of coastal North Carolina could fall victim to extreme flooding in the very near future… several portions of North Carolina can be seen below the annual flood level by the year 2030,” Breaking News, Fox8/North Carolina, July 21, 2023.

Indeed, mainstream news outlets like the Miami Herald and Fox8 News are ringing the bell at the town square, warning about sea level rise flooding portions of Florida and North Carolina… real soon!

And this: According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Gulf Coast region saw more than a 1,000% increase in the number of high tide flooding days in 2020 over the past two decades. (Source: Gulf Coast Sea Level Rising at ‘Unprecedented’ Rate, Recent Studies Find, Houston Public Media, April 12, 2023)

In turn, all above brings to surface questions about motives of people who denigrate, attack, and belittle the climate change issue, human-caused global warming, and renewables thereby serving to block or interfere with nationwide efforts to do something constructive. Their line of thinking is extraordinarily dangerous to the country in the face of actual flooding events along America’s coasts that are locked loaded and ready for more action very soon. Mainstream news has clearly identified impending danger.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), sea level rise over the next 30 years will equal the past 100 years. “In the United States, the most vulnerable populations live on the East and Gulf Coasts… The acceleration of sea level rise along these coasts is ‘unprecedented in at least 120 years.” (Source: Acceleration of U.S. Southeast and Gulf Coast Sea-Level Rise Amplified by Internal Climate Variability, Nature Communications, April 2023)

The Antarctic summer of 2023 is on shaky footing as global heat is on the march worldwide like never before, and it knows no boundaries from south to north, every ecosystem everywhere is fair game. Of course, a major concern is rapid acceleration of ice shelf disintegration, especially fragile West Antarctica where Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glacier are already the fastest changing and most unstable glaciers in the world. Incidentally, Thwaites has a nickname: The Doomsday Glacier.

Robert Hunziker
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This article was originally published on October 6, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Note: This article will also be posted on the Facing Future Now! Facebook group. If you would like to comment on this article, please go to the Facebook group and post your comments there under the article posting.

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Antarctica Hits Records as Global Heat Looms Large for 2024

Photo by Juan Cruz Mountford
Photo by Juan Cruz Mountford licensed by Unsplash

Antarctica Hits Records as Global Heat Looms Large for 2024

By Robert Hunziker

“Climate breakdown has begun. Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. (Source: 2024 Likely to be Hottest Year on Record, Phys.org, September 6, 2023)

A report from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) released by the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in Berlin in the spring of 2023 reveals how surprisingly fast the icy continent is changing and its impact on the world. At current levels of global warming, the planet is already committed to approximately 16 inches of global sea level rise, “which turns what was once considered a one in 100-year coastal flood event into an annual one.” (Source: Report: Antarctic is Changing Dramatically with Global Consequences, Phys.org, June 13, 2023)

Annual 100-year coastal flooding events puts one billion people at annual risks of losing homes, coastlines, and port facilities… every year! Maybe build sea walls… everywhere, worldwide? After all, sea level rise is not going to stop on its own. In fact, already, according to the Miami Herald: “Many of the main roads in the Florida Keys could be under water as soon as 2025.” (Source: Some Keys Roads Will Flood by 2025 Due to Sea Rise, Fixing Them Could Cost $750 Million, Miami Herald, Oct. 21, 2021)

Moreover, the 33rd annual State of the Climate Report published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society/Boulder discusses the vast extremes in Antarctica, which interestingly mirror similar climate extremes throughout the planet. It seems that climate change/global heating is synchronized throughout the world, which is likely a first of wide-spread implications, none positive.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has experienced “enhanced warming” and is starting to lose ice much more rapidly than scientists ever expected at this early juncture. Meanwhile, in the heart of the continent, temperatures blew past all records, 79°F (44°C) higher than average March temperatures; a weather station recorded a balmy 14.7°F in the interior where temperatures on average run -71°F.

Of even more concern, an Antarctic heat wave occurred during the transition period from summer to winter when the temperature always drops rapidly, but that normalized behavior looks to be gone for now.

Like the rest of the planet, Antarctica experiences heat waves as well as intense unprecedented precipitation via atmospheric rivers, which in the north regions of the planet turn into massive, destructive flooding. Antarctica had a tripling of normalized snowfall. Thus, a new concern is future atmospheric rivers bringing enhanced heat causing more rapid melt and/or rain that gooses sea levels well beyond current expectations. Atmospheric rivers in Antarctica bring a new threat of indeterminate dimensions to sea level rise. Importantly, “Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth. The rare snowfall events on the cold Antarctic continent usually come from so-called atmospheric rivers (ARs)… they only occur a few days per year.” (Source: Contribution of Atmospheric Rivers to Antarctic Precipitation, Geophysical Research Letters, September 7, 2022) Antarctica just had a tripling of normal snowfall as climate change extends abnormalities to the southern-most regions of the planet.

The Antarctica issue will likely get worse as highlighted by a new report claiming that the pace of CO2 concentration has increased three-fold, due mostly to burning fossil fuels, the primary force behind global warming. (Source: State of the Climate Report, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) The NOAA report noted that CO2 levels are: (1) 50% higher than pre-industrial (2) the highest in the modern atmospheric record (3) the highest in the paleoclimate records over the past 800,000 years. And annual growth in global mean carbon dioxide, when averaged across the last decade, “has tripled since the 1960s.” Averaged annual growth over a decade that triples is flat-out fast.

The NOAA report emphasizes the fact that the world is running too warm aka: hot. China, for example, endured “the worst heat wave ever recorded anywhere in the world in 2022,” disrupting major sectors of the country. The massive heatwave caused widespread power shortages and disrupted key food and industrial supply chains. Coincidentally, China’s economy is on the ropes in a big way, hmm.

As for 2023, Pigs, Rabbits and Fish Are Dying from Searing Temperatures in China, CNN Business News, June 2, 2023, as wheat fields flood with the heaviest rainfall in a decade. Radical climate change officially erupted in China with many large cities hitting 40°C (104°F) and staying there for some time.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is focusing on food security, as quoted in Qiushi, the Communist Party’s main theoretical journal: “Once something’s wrong with agriculture, our bowls will be held in someone else’s hands, and we’ll have to depend on others for food. How can we achieve modernization in that case?” Ibid.

According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the past eight years are the hottest on record with 2023 set to be hotter than any of them, the hottest year in human history, whilst 20% of global land gets hit hard by drought. Excessive heat is hitting everywhere, e.g., the Swiss Alps lost a record 6% of volume in one year. Consider that rate over another decade, or two, and what remains?

Copernicus’ Update, September 2023: Antarctic sea ice remained at a record low for the time of year with a monthly value 12% below average, which is “by far the largest anomaly for August since satellite observations began in the 1970s.” How many more 12% below averages does it take to throw a wrench into predictions of 16 inches of sea level rise already baked into the cake? And that’s just for starters based upon what’s been happening so far.

The El Niño Threat – it’s going to get worse.

The El Niño weather phenomenon, which increases heat in the southern Pacific and spreads across the world has only just begun. Scientists say its worst effects will be felt at the end of 2023, into 2024 and possibly beyond. Unfortunately, with the world climate system now synchronized and determined by global warming’s impact, it’s highly probable that Antarctica will get hit even harder, especially West Antarctica, which has been notoriously labeled “fragile.”

According to Mark Maslin, a professor of climatology at University College London: “2023 is the year that climate records were not just broken but smashed… extreme weather events are now common and getting worse every year—this is a wakeup call to international leaders.” (Source: 2023 Likely to be Hottest Year on Record, Phys,org, September 6, 2023).

“Global warming continues because we have not stopped burning fossil fuels—it is that simple,” Friederike Otto, climate scientist, Imperial College London, Ibid.

Meanwhile, with great anticipation, COP28 is in bright flashing lights: The largest, the most extravagant, the most anticipated, the most attended, the most world leader photo-ops (100+). the most private jets, the most golden embroidered structures, the favorite playground of petrostates, the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, more commonly referred to as COP28, will be the 28th United Nations Climate Change conference, held from November 30 until December 12, 2023, at the Expo City, Dubai.

It’s fair to say that COP28 will be confronted with the most challenging, the most tumultuous climate system in human history.

What will 80,000 attendees at a fossil fuel-hosted climate conference come up with?
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This article was originally published on September 29, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

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Climate Emergency Update, September 2023

Image by Markus Spiske
Photo by Markus Spiske is licensed by Unsplash

Climate Emergency Update, September 2023

By Robert Hunziker

Earth’s climate system is in a state of emergency. Emergencies are defined by four specific elements, i.e., (1) seriousness (2) unexpected (3) dangerous, and (4) requiring immediate action. Based upon a new YouTube broadcast by the inveterate commentator Dr. Peter Carter, all those elements are in-play in a very big way.

Dr. Carter, expert reviewer of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and director of the Climate Emergency Institute, posted a 26:33 minute YouTube update on the status of our climate system: Climate Emergency Update Sept. 2023. In his broadcast, the elements of an emergency are clearly related to the planet’s climate system.

Dr. Carter’s broadcasts are closely followed by people looking for answers to what’s really happening. Indeed, it is rare, in fact, almost impossible to find a source that truly lays it out without pulling any punches. His presentations are excellent, filled with factually backed statements that are brought to life with emphasis. Indeed, Dr. Carter is a rare personality, a breath of fresh air in today’s world of cynicism, disinformation, and the tendency to ignore difficult choices, especially the challenging status of the planet’s climate system. It is the one thing that we must “get right.”

The following synopsis, including editorial comment, highlights the issues as seen by Dr. Peter Carter:

In his opening statement he starts by reporting the state of the climate today as “worse… than ever before,” emphasizing the fact that it’s actually “much worse than ever before.” He suggests: “If it seems to you that the climate situation is getting worse, yes, it is. There’s no question about that, and it’s been getting worse for a long time. That’s what the science has told us, for example, in scientifically based assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

For years, his motto has been: “Everything is getting worse faster.”

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) identifies the climate’s status as “a major climate disruption that’s driven by atmospheric CO2.” In that regard, the risks to the planet’s climate system have increased substantially, as atmospheric CO2 and methane are higher than they’ve ever been whilst increasing faster than ever before. Carter: “It’s a recipe for an overwhelmingly destructive global warming scenario.” And, frankly, that’s what’s been starting to appear on TV.

Ocean surface temperature has been off-the-charts, rapidly increasing like never before. According to Carter: Fossil fuel impact is adding heat to the oceans at the rate of 10 Hiroshima bombs per second. Moreover, he claims it’s at least that amount and some sources claim it’s even higher than 10 Hiroshima bombs per second. Of course, one problem with comparisons like 10 Hiroshima bombs/second is the impossibility of imagining that scope, which unfortunately causes people to fail to get it.

Meanwhile, the hard truth is that it was thirty years ago 1992 in Rio de Janeiro at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that 166 countries initially agreed that global warming needed to be counteracted. Over the subsequent 30 years nothing has happened. Meantime, the science has been hard at work, essentially confirming: “We are headed for the collapse of the biosphere… we are on a rapid trend of biosphere collapse” (YouTube, 4:52 min).

This fatal destiny of biosphere collapse is the result of a world economy agenda that’s designed “to burn all of the fossil fuels.” However, as if by the sleight of hand, it’s claimed, by pro-growth and pro-fossil fuel interests, we’ll be able to geo-engineer our way out of the quagmire of excessive atmospheric Co2, not-to-worry. But, according to Dr. Carter: “That is absolute nonsense.” More on the carbon capture ruse later.

The Methane Threat

Methane is coming into focus as an extremely troublesome threat with scientists on edge like never before. Over the past couple of years, since 2019-20, methane emissions have been explosive, which is precisely how scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) refer to today’s methane emissions: “Explosive!”

Even worse yet, Carter highlights what he refers to as “the newest terrible news”: “We have methane feedback,” meaning the explosive increase in methane emissions is hands free on auto pilot; it’s the wetlands! This is really bad news because the feedback is literally running wild. Carter: “This is what we have been dreading for decades.”

Even more troubling yet, most scientific models have claimed we did not have to worry about this specific event, i.e., self-reinforcing methane emissions, until the end of the century. Carter: “Well, it’s here now; it’s here bigtime.” The problem is not a small one as wetlands hold double the amount of carbon as forests. According to David Archer, in one of his carbon climate publications, the climate has never had as much carbon aboard as it has now, and it’s mostly in wetlands.

Euan Nesbit, Emeritus Professor, Earth Sciences, University of London, Honorary Fellow, Darwin College, the world’s leading scientist on methane has sounded the alarm about wetland methane feedback. He put out a paper a couple of weeks ago “that’s nothing short of terrifying.” The paper: Atmospheric Methane: Comparison Between Methane’s Record in 2006-2022 and During Glacial Terminations, American Geophysical Union, July 14, 2023.

Moreover, the ultra-dangerous East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which is loaded with methane hydrates, is possibly being compromised, see: Seafloor Methane Tipping Point Reached! Titanic Lifeboat Academy, September 18, 2023.

Methane explosiveness is likely one of the factors behind: “July was the hottest month ever on record.” According to NASA, the Northern Hemisphere was almost 1.7°C. Of course, one month does not make a year, but throughout the planet, for example, all of Europe, temperatures above the dreaded 1.5°C and/or 2.0°C continue to pop up, almost like a permanent trend. It’s unnerving and signaling a very early arrival of inhospitable ecosystems, like what’s already happening in northern Canada and all across the northern reaches of the Northern Hemisphere.

As a result, crazy things happen at both poles. For example, suddenly, Antarctica’s sea ice has become something to worry about after decades of “no worries.” It reached record lows in February 2023, and even worse, when it refreezes, it does so at a slower and slower pace. Carter: “This is a very, very bad, complex, disturbing, disrupting thing that’s happening in Antarctica.” (FYI -There are some well-known Antarctic experts who’ve flat-out said they are scared)

All the while, as the biosphere is experiencing massive intense disturbing, disrupting threats to ecosystems that literally support life, governments are pushing for more and more fossil fuels. According to The Economist, there will be no slowdown in extraction and burning of fossil fuels. According to the IPCC 6th Assessment, because of fossil fuel emissions increasing: “We are looking at temperature increases that are way far-out, totally unprecedented.” (YouTube, 12:40) A scientific paper that came out earlier this year made the point that the temperature rate of increase over the past decade was unprecedented.

Honestly, you only had to turn on the TV news over the past summer to know about unprecedented temperatures and the relationship to human-caused global warming. As such, global warming is slowly going mainstream, causing people to cock their heads to one side as if to question, “what’s going on and is this real news or is it fake news?” Poorly educated people claim it’s fake or totally exaggerated. But is it?

Another disturbing issue is drought conditions throughout the world – NASA’s Grace satellites are the most reliable measurements of drought. And nowhere is drought more responsible for climate chaos than Canada. Canada’s massive fires are driven by global warming; a recent study of Grace data shows the entire north of Canada in severe drought fed by global surface warming. It’s a massive climate catastrophe that simply will not stop and likely one of the worst most disheartening and threatening scenarios of the decade.

Moreover, another major concern detected by Grace satellites: “All of Europe is subject to ground water depletion drought.” In fact, the EU officially made mention of this at the beginning of the year in a public statement. What could possibly be worse? Already, consequences were on display in France and Italy when over 100 towns and villages ran out of ground water during the summer of 2022, governments scrambled to temporarily truck-in bottled water.

Last year (2022) was a record-year of unprecedented mega disasters. And 2023 is similar. All of this is being driven by fossil fuels. The Economist claims oil production/consumption will be higher in 2030 than it is today, as well as increased use of coal, because increased heat waves in China and India require extraordinary measures for air conditioning, requiring more power plant production. They easily turn to coal.

Dr. Carter issued what he refers to as “the worst news ever” … the IMF recently published an assessment of fossil fuel subsidies worldwide of $7,000,000,000,000 in 2022. Meaning governments are subsidizing the destruction of the planet at the rate of $13M per minute. Ten years ago, it was $5 trillion for one year. He believes this is why young people rightfully protest fossil fuels.

Governments must act immediately to stop fossil fuels because the entire climate system is starting to turn inside out. For example, approximately 50% of emissions are absorbed by the carbon sinks of land and ocean. But boreal forests are on fire, emitting carbon, not absorbing carbon. Boreal forests circumnavigate the planet and are absolutely vital for our survival. They are vital to all life. Canada alone has had 5,936 boreal fires to date this year. The burned area is 58,687 square miles, a figure that boggles the mind.

According to Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Services, boreal forests in regions all over the world have experienced the worst wildfires in recorded history. As a result of the world’s major forests burning, emitting carbon instead of absorbing it, the year-over-year increase in Co2 from July 2022 to July 2023 was a record high increase of 3,29 ppm, 422.14 ppm versus 418.85, a massive increase.

The big question: What can we do? Carter: “We must recognize that we have an enemy, which is fossil fuels.”

We must act now because our greatest asset and one of our last lines of defense for life on the planet, the boreal forest, is burning, emitting CO2 instead of absorbing it. Carter: “This is beyond critical!!!” The boreal forest is the largest forest area of the world, covering one-tenth of the world’s land, wrapped around the entire Northern Hemisphere. It feeds our lungs and stores our carbon. Without it, we fail.

“Extreme wildfires are turning the world’s largest forest ecosystem from carbon sink into net-emitter.” (Source: Alaska Beacon, March 2023) How can this not be anything other than a worldwide emergency?

In summation, Dr. Carter’s update emphasizes six major categories (1) ocean surface temperatures off the charts (2) impending biosphere collapse (3) the methane threat coming unglued, way too early (4) world government policies continue to favor fossil fuels, more than ever (5) severe worldwide drought (6) loss of boreal forests – a key lifeline.

COP28/Dubai, the meeting of the nations of the world on climate change, starts in a few weeks. It’s likely that oil & gas interests will claim carbon removal and sequestration will save our asses. That’s extremely doubtful. (Carbon Capture Has a Long History of Failure, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, September 2022)

According to the US EPA’s description of carbon capture: “It’s technologies that are not economically or technically feasible for widespread use.”

And according to a recent Al Gore speech, Orca (Iceland), the first large-scale carbon dioxide removal plant’s operations are being improved enough so that, in 7 years, each DAC unit will be able to capture 27 seconds worth of annual worldwide emissions. There are 8 units, do the math!

More to the point, according to Dr. Carter: “It is absolute nonsense.”

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This article was originally published on September 22, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

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Global Warming Did The Unthinkable

Image by NOAA
Image by NOAA is in the Public Domain.

Global Warming Did The Unthinkable

By Robert Hunziker

Jungfraujoch’s foreboding temperatures this September at the top of the world in Switzerland at 2.25 miles altitude alarmed glaciologists.

If anybody has lingering doubts about global warming’s strength of power to directly impact Earth’s ecosystems, think again. Antarctica, at the bottom of the world, experienced record high temperatures during its winter, as record high temperatures were also recorded at the top of the world in the Swiss Alps, where it’s always icy cold. As it happened, both the top and the bottom of the world hit record high temperatures, simultaneously, give or take a few days. There’s no known record of this ever happening before.

It’s proof positive that global warming is powerfully impacting the entire planet, simultaneously, and it’s happening horrifyingly fast! Too fast to justify petty, phony claims amongst some Americans, with a voice, that global warming’s nothing more than “natural events, the climate always changes, not to worry, blah, blah, blah!” Oh, please, grow up!

But maybe people should be in the streets demonstrating to pull out all the stops to prevent the inevitable, which is self-advertised in full-living descriptive color as both ends of the planet go off course in ballistic fashion within several days of each other. The upshot is global warming (heat) has become Top Dog of the Earth System, pushing aside Goldilocks’ not-too-hot-not-too-cold tenure over the past several thousand years of the Holocene Era. The problem: Goldilocks was a sweetheart. But global warming is a mean-spirited bully, without heart.

Jungfraujoch is the tallest SwissMetNet station in Switzerland at 11,715 feet. Temperatures above 0° Celsius (32°F) for eight straight days in the month of September shocked glaciologists. That had never happened before in its 90-year history of official recordings.

The Jungfraujoch environment, according to its web page: “Icy air sweeps your face, snow crunches underfoot, and the panorama almost takes your breath away: on one side the view of the Swiss Mittelland towards the Vosges, on the other the Aletsch Glacier, lined with four thousand metre peaks. Standing on the Jungfraujoch 3,454 metres above sea level, you can feel it with your first step: this is a different world.”

Glaciologists say this new zero-degree record at extreme altitude is an ominous sign. Of serious concern, Switzerland has ~1,500 ice giants that don’t fancy a lot of heat. Those ice giants have faithfully served as the world’s most trustworthy water towers ever since humans first huddled in caves during the Stone Age a couple million years ago. Now, those wondrous glaciers are at risk of meltdown within only one century after a couple million years of steady work.

Not only did Jungfraujoch register 8-straight days over zero, but at the higher altitude of 5,298 metres Swiss MeteoSwiss reported record temperatures over the zero-degree limit.

“The zero-degree limit is a key meteorological indicator particularly in mountainous regions, as it ‘affects vegetation, the snow line and the water cycle and so has considerable impact on the habitats of humans, animals, and plants alike.” (Source: Climate Records tumble as Switzerland Swelters in Heatwave, Swissinfo.ch, August 22, 2023)

Swiss glaciers have lost one-third of ice volume in only 20 years. The next twenty could be crucial. According to Daniel Farinotti, glaciologist at ETH Zurich: “With a zero-degree isotherm far above 5,000 metres, all glaciers in the Alps are exposed to melt — up to their highest altitudes. Such events are rare and detrimental to the glacier’s health… if such conditions persist in the longer-term, glaciers are set to be lost irreversibly,” Ibid.

“Since the pre-industrial era, the temperature in Switzerland has increased by almost 2° Celsius, well above the global average. At this rate, half of the 1,500 Alpine glaciers – including the majestic Aletsch glacier, a UNESCO heritage site — will disappear in the next 30 years. And if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, all glaciers in Switzerland and Europe risk melting almost completely by the end of the century.” (Source: Why Melting Glaciers Affect Us All, Swissinfo.ch, October 11, 2022)

All of which is a good primer on what to expect if the world average hits 1.5°C and then 2°C, both of which look doable based upon the rapidity of greenhouse gas emissions, for example, CO2 and methane both setting new world records in July 2023.

And it’s also instructive to note, the world is not uniform, e.g., according to Copernicus Climate Change Service: Extreme Heat, Widespread Drought Typify European Climate in 2022, April 20, 2023: “The C35 data show that the average temperature for Europe for the latest 5-year period was around 2.2°C above the pre-industrial era (1850-1900). In 2022 all hell broke out through0ut the EU with water deliveries by truck to 100 thirsty communities in France/Italy and major riverway barges sputtering in mud. It was an “end of the world” type of experience that they muddled through. Of special concern, 75% of Spain’s land risks desertification because of global warming’s severe drought.

Glaciers worldwide are being hit, getting thinner and thinner in the Himalayas and the Andes where hundreds of millions of people depend upon glaciers for hydro power, irrigation, and drinking water. The situation in Europe is horribly problematic as the water flow of major commercial rivers like the Rhône, Rhine, Danube, and Po decrease, especially in summer months because of severe drought that hammered the EU. This has already, at times, seriously impaired commercial barge traffic in Europe, and lo and behold, nuclear power plants are targets of global warming. France’s 56 nuclear reactors were impacted within the past two years. Marine life as well as nuclear reactors depend upon a constant flow of cold water for existence. However, when global warming makes life in an ecosystem nearly impossible, marine life moves, reactors cannot.

A new report on Himalayan glacier loss shows a melt rate 65% faster from 2010 t0 2020 than in the prior decade, 2000-10. That’s big-time acceleration for enormous chunks of ice. That finding adds to “a growing body of evidence that the consequences of climate change are speeding up, and that some changes will be irreversible.” (Source: Snow and Ice in the Hindu Kush Himalaya Are Fast Disappearing, with Grave Implications for People and Nature, International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, icimod.org, 2023)

The Hindu Kush Himalaya provides freshwater for 2 billion people. At current melt rates, almost all of the glacial volume will be gone this century.

Peak Water

Researchers say the mountain glacier systems will reach a point by 2050 when the glaciers have shrunk so much that the meltwater starts dwindling. It’s called a turning point “peak water.”

Meanwhile, melting glaciers spur natural disasters of epic proportions, cascading disasters of flooding and huge landslides like sudden shocks to the system, like earthquake events. Furthermore, there is already evidence of loss of biodiversity habitat, especially butterflies have gone extinct in the Hindu Kush Himalaya. Frogs and other amphibians are on the short list to go next. Scientists expect a quarter of plants and animals to be “wiped out” over the coming decades with the Indian segment of the Himalayan mountains hit extremely hard. (Source: Sunita Chaudhary, ecosystems researcher, International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development).

As previously mentioned, Antarctica has joined the “it’s never happened before” party. The ice continent, as large as the U.S. and Mexico combined, is the coldest continent on Earth with a mean annual interior temperature of -71F. However, in the dead of winter, the Antarctic Peninsula, an 800-mile extension of the Antarctic continent, temperatures hit 32°F (Source: It’s Even Hot in Antarctica, Where it’s Winter, Vox, July 13, 2023). Which happened shortly before zero C at Jungfraujoch, as the top of the world and the bottom of the world coincided in extreme once-in-a-lifetime events, which researchers believe may become a trend, thereby losing the once-in-a-lifetime status, with the ramifications best not discussed herein. They’re too extensive and exhausting!

By now, it has become obvious that Earth’s climate system is askew, out of balance, and rapidly changing the face of the planet. Some knowledgeable people believe the best course of action is to learn to adapt to this rapidly changing environment because it does not appear that fossil fuel emissions are going anywhere but up, up, up, like they have for decades, higher every year, but for various legit reasons, do not count on CO2 capture/sequestration (CCS) or direct air capture (DAC) to bail us out of a worldwide heat jam, in part, because the scale is way beyond humongous, meaning the problem is as big as the planet is large, and that’s really, really big. Meanwhile, emissions continue to feed into more destructive global warming events, testing the mettle of humans, as fossil fuel emissions (the heart and soul of global warming) increasingly choke a planet that’s already sputtering.

COP28

All of which is supposed to be discussed amongst the nations of the world at the upcoming COP28 (UN Climate Change Conference) to be held in Dubai, November 30 – December 12, 2023, but there are serious reservations about the venue and the host and the participants as expressed in a letter sent by Freedom Forward and signed by 200 organizations: 200+ Organizations Call on Governments to Address UAE Human Rights Abuses Ahead of COP28 Climate Negotiations with the subtitle: Letter to COP28 participating Governments Regarding United Arab Emirates (UAE) Human Rights Violations and Climate Concerns, September 13, 2023.

The opening paragraph: “We write as a global network of organizations with grave human rights concerns regarding the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) host of the 2023 Cop28 to be held by the rulers of a repressive petrostate, and overseen by an oil executive, is reckless, represents a blatant conflict of interest, and threatens the legitimacy of the whole process.”

Meanwhile, the history of UN meetings to fix the planet is not encouraging: For example, in 2015, 193 countries agreed to UN Sustainable Development Goals, aka: Global Goals. As of August 2023, after 8 years of dalliance, not one of the goals looks set to be achieved. (Nature, 9/12/2023).

As a result of the failure of sustainable development goals and for that matter, any and all such goals, a new research report indicates that Earth’s life support systems have been so damaged that the planet is “well outside the safe operating space for humanity.” To come back to a safe space, two key actions are required: (1) stop fossil fuel burning (2) end destructive farming. (Source: Earth Beyond Six of Nine Planetary Boundaries, Science Advances, Sept. 13, 2023)

Alas, like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Paris ’15 climate goals to achieve net zero have mostly bombed.

COP28/Dubai is weeks away. They expect a record turnout of up to 80,000 participants, claiming: “COP28 is poised to shape the course of international climate action.” Hmm.
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This article was originally published on September 15, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Note: This article will also be posted on the Facing Future Now! Facebook group. If you would like to comment on this article, please go to the Facebook group and post your comments there under the article posting.

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Japan’s Insane Immoral, Illegal Radioactive Dumping

Photo by Yves Alarie on Unsplash
Photo by Yves Alarie on Unsplash

Japan’s Insane Immoral, Illegal Radioactive Dumping

By Robert Hunziker

Japan cannot possibly outlive the atrocity of dumping radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. In fact, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is an example of how nuclear meltdowns negatively impact the entire world, as its toxic wastewater travels across the world in ocean currents. The dumping of stored toxic wastewater from the meltdown in 2011 officially started on August 24th, 2023. Meanwhile, the country restarts some of the nuclear plants that were shut down when the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant exploded.

Fukushima’s broken reactors are an example of why nuclear energy is a trap that can’t handle global warming or extreme natural disasters. Nuclear is an accident waiting to happen, for several reasons, including victimization by forces of global warming.

According to Dr. Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, former secretary to the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Internal Radiation, and Visiting Fellow, University of Sussex: “It’s important to understand that nuclear is very likely to be a significant climate casualty. For cooling purposes nuclear reactors need to be situated by large bodies of water, etc. …” Essentially, global warming is nuclear energy’s Waterloo; it has already seriously endangered France’s 56 nuclear reactors with partial shutdowns because of extreme global warming. Nuclear reactors cannot survive global warming. See “the nuclear energy trap” link at the end of this article.

TEPCO’s treacherous act of dumping radioactive water into a wide-open ocean is a deliberate violation of human decency, as it clearly violates essential provisions of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) General Safety Guide No. 8 (GSG-8).

Japan should be forced to stop its diabolical exercise of potentially destroying precious life. Shame on the IAEA and shame on the member countries of the G7 for endorsing this travesty. They’ve christened the ocean an “open sewer.” Hark! Come one, come all, dump your trash, open toxic spigots, bring chemicals, bring fertilizers, bring plastic, bring radioactive waste that’s impossible to dispose… the oceans are open sewers. It’s free! Yes, it’s free but only weak-minded people would allow a broken-down crippled nuclear power plant to dump radioactive waste into the world’s ocean. It is a testament to human frailty, weakness, insipience, not courage.

According to Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, TEPCO’s ALPS-treated Radioactive Water Dumping Plan Violates Essential Provisions of IAEA’s General Safety Guide No. 8 (GSG-8) and Corresponding Requirements in Other IAEA Documents, June 28, 2023: “The IAEA is an important United Nations institution. Like the rest of the Expert Panel, the author of this paper has been reluctant to criticize the IAEA. Yet, its outright refusal to apply its own guidance documents in full measure is stark. Its constricted view of the dumping plan has allowed it to evade its responsibilities to many countries. Its eagerness to assure the public that harm will be “negligible” has been carried to the point of grossly overstating well-known facts about tritium. The serious lapses of the IAEA in the Fukushima radioactive water matter have made criticism unavoidable.”

“Greenpeace rejects Japan’s claim that all nuclear isotopes except tritium have been removed from the wastewater. It claims that at least one other radioactive isotope, Carbon-14, remains, and that many more, including Strontium 90 and Cesium 137, remain as yet untreated in most of the storage tanks.” (Source: Richard Broinowski, More Fallout from Fukushima, Pearls and Irritations, July 8, 2023)

Japan is signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: “Japan’s policy to release wastewater into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a violation of Japan’s obligations under UNCLOS Article 192, which requires state parties to ‘protect and preserve the marine environment.’ Additionally, Japan’s pollution of the marine environment from land-based sources violates UNCLOS Article 207.” (Source: Victoria Cruz-De Jesus, Preserving the Sea in a Radioactive World: How Japan’s Plan to Release Treated Nuclear Wastewater into the Pacific Ocean Violates UNCLOS, American University International Law Review, Vol. 27, Issue 4, 2023)

Adding insult to injury, Japan considered several available waste disposal measures that, in part, would have complied with portions of its treaty obligations under UNCLOS Article 192 and Article 207 but ultimately settled for the cheapest, easiest, most convenient, yet most harmful, policy, dumping it into the Pacific Ocean, which conveniently is “right next door.” Japan could have chosen (1) geosphere injection or (2) underground burial as options that lessen the risks of nuclear waste released into the environment, or they could build more storage tanks. But both #1 and #2 options are considerably more expensive.

As a result, Japan’s outrageous disregard for nature has only served to highlight the insanity surrounding nuclear energy: “The Japanese Government and TEPCO falsely claim that discharge is the only viable option necessary for eventual decommissioning. Nuclear power generation, which experiences shutdowns due to accidents and natural disasters, and perpetually requires thermal power as a backup, cannot serve as a solution to global warming.” (Source: Japan Announces Date for Fukushima Radioactive Water Release, Greenpeace International Press Release, August 22, 2023)

According to Greenpeace, which has strong expertise in nuclear energy: “As of 8 June 2023, there were 1,335,381 cubic meters of radioactive wastewater stored in tanks, but due to the failure of the ALPS (Advanced Liquid Processing System) processing technology, approximately 70% of this water will have to be processed again. Scientists have warned that the radiological risks from the discharges have not been fully assessed, and the biological impacts of tritium, carbon-14, strontium-90 and iodine-129, which will be released in the discharges, have been ignored,” Ibid.

It seems inconceivable, but true, at a time when the world’s oceans are confronted with immense stress (1) inordinate record-setting heat (2) illegal overfishing to the point of near exhaustion of major fishing stock (3) human trash accumulating in vast swirls of rotting garbage, e.g., the Great Pacific Garbage Patch three times the size of France; plus four more major garbage patches in the oceans (4) rampant levels of agricultural pesticides and fertilizers, (5) tons of plastic and (6) industrial discharges. In the face of so much stress, Japan has the nerve to add toxic radioactive muck from a crippled nuclear power plant. Oh, please!

“For years, we have looked at the ocean as a dumping ground. Because it was out of sight and out of mind, we have treated it like a universal sewer.” (Jean Michel Cousteau, St. Petersburg Times) Cousteau has spent a lifetime fighting to expose ocean abuse, saying it needs to stop “if marine life, and therefore everything on the planet, is going to survive.” Alas, Japan is violating everything Cousteau ever stood for.

As a result of indiscretions, will Japan essentially self-destruct its economy as boycotts of products follow in the footsteps of its blatant disregard for the health of the ocean?

China has banned all seafood from Japan, calling the release a “selfish and irresponsible act.” Chinese social media registered 800,000,000 views on Weibo, filled with anger. China is Japan’s largest buyer of seafood accounting for one-half of Japan’s seafood exports.

Major Japanese cosmetics manufacturers have seen sales drop along with public share prices as Chinese internet users began compiling lists of Japanese brands to boycott, attracting 300,000,000 views on Weibo. The boycott could be a “trigger for Chinese consumers to switch away from Japanese premium cosmetics brands,” said Wakako Sato, an analyst for Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co. (Source: Controversial Fukushima Nuclear Waste Plan Spurs Chinese Boycott of Japanese Cosmetics, Time, June 22, 2023)

On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, users have circulated lists of Japanese brands ranging from cosmetics to food and beverages. urging people not to buy those products.

South Korea and Hong Kong are banning Japanese seafood from Fukushima and nine other prefectures. North Korea’s Foreign Ministry called the release a “crime against humanity,” which Japan can only view as the most humiliating insult of all time.

Is Japan setting a dangerous precedent? According to the New York Times, d/d August 22, 2023: “If Japan dumps its tainted Fukushima water in the ocean, what’s to stop other countries from doing the same?” Indeed, this may be one of the most deadly consequences of TEPCO’s dumping, with G7 approval.

“We’ve seen an inadequate radiological, ecological impact assessment that makes us very concerned that Japan would not only be unable to detect what’s getting into the water, sediment and organisms, but if it does, there is no recourse to remove it… there’s no way to get the genie back in the bottle,” marine biologist Robert Richmond, a professor with the University of Hawaii, told the BBC’s Newsday programme.” (Source: Fukushima: What are the Concerns Over Waste Water Release? BBC News, August 25, 2023)

TEPCO admits to some level of radiation when it releases water from storage tanks. According to a CNN news article, Japan claims other countries are also guilty of releasing tritium-laced water into the ocean. So, why can’t they also do it? However, this misses the point that nobody should be allowed to release radioactive water into the oceans. Furthermore, TEPCO’s concentrations, with 60 highly toxic radioactive isotopes, hopefully treated by ALPS (Advanced Liquid Processing System) processing technology, makes other dumpers look like pipsqueaks. Even worse yet, Greenpeace/Japan, and others, have strong reservations about the effectiveness of ALPS, and consider: Who’s measuring?

The U.S. National Association of Marine Laboratories, with over 100 member laboratories, issued a position paper strongly opposing the toxic dumping because of a lack of adequate and accurate scientific data in support of Japan’s assertions of safety.

And regardless of Japan’s attempts to downplay the dumping as inconsequential, it has been scientifically established that even very low doses of radioactivity bio-accumulate in the human body, as well as in marine life, over time leading to physical deterioration because of DNA damage.

“At high doses, ionizing radiation can cause immediate damage to a person’s body, including, at very high doses, radiation sickness and death. At lower doses, ionizing radiation can cause health effects such as cardiovascular disease and cataracts, as well as cancer. It causes cancer primarily because it damages DNA, which can lead to cancer-causing gene mutations.” (Source: National Cancer Institute)

How is it possible to justify dumping any amount of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean? Is the world’s consciousness so low, so lacking a moral compass, that it’s okay to dump the most toxic material on the planet into the oceans?

Stop destroying the oceans!

And please contemplate the dire ramifications of the nuclear energy trap

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This article was originally published on September 8, 2023 © Counterpunch
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

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