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Business as usual. We’ve been on a two and a half century trend with the advent of the industrial revolution. We didn’t set out to re-configure the atmosphere, land and oceans, but those changes have been the cumulative result of our quarter millennium exercise in harnessing any and all planetary resources to enrich ourselves. In the beginning of this process we were unaware that we could exhaust finite resources and alter planetary norms. But with our success and growing numbers we are now able to exert planetary changes by simply doing the same things our great-great grandparents did, but due to their much smaller numbers, had a much smaller impact.

We are the first generation actively engaged in the industrial revolution to discover the dire consequences of this two and a half century process. We are also the first generation with that knowledge to resist changing our trajectory of planetary re-design. Instead, we are choosing to leave that crucial step to an as yet unborn generation, who will be forced to do so in the greatly compromised world we will have left them.

‘Worst’ of Climate Predictions Are the Most Likely: New Study

Groundbreaking research on cloud behavior and global warming says ‘catastrophic’ increase of 4°C or more by 2100 should be expected.
-by Jon Queally, Common Dreams staff writer

Arctic Sea Ice Levels and Al Gore’s “Prediction”

While climate change deniers misrepresent what Al Gore said about Arctic ice, the reality in the Arctic outpaces the most pessimistic predictions. It’s time to get angry and do something.-Bruce Melton, Truth-Out, October 4, 2013.

Climate Change Won’t Wait

“Obama appears unwilling or unable to take the tough steps to deal with global warming. In Washington over Presidents Day weekend, the largest environmental demonstration in years will try to prod him.”-Op-Ed by Bill McKibben, LA Times, January 6, 2013.

Climate Change and the Unrestrained Elite

“Neoliberalism is not the root of the problem: it is the ideology used to justify a global grab of power, public assets and natural resources by an unrestrained elite.”-By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com, December 12, 2012

Climate Silence, Nuclear Silence and Solar Silence: An Unholy Trinity

“In a climate-disrupted world, nuclear power plants are not reliable partners.”-David Kraft, director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service to InsideClimate News. Analysis by H. Patricia Hynes, retired professor of environmental health from Boston University and board chair of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice. Dec. 5, 2012.

Living in a world managed by psychopaths

“The greatest threat to the United States will never be al Qaeda, Russia, China or Iran. It will be our failure to wrest control of public policy from the inmates of our own insane asylum,” says Brian Moench. Dec. 5, 2012.

A 70-Year-Old Documentary About Cities Shows We Haven’t Come Very Far

“If you’ve ever found yourself looking around the sprawled-out, suburbanized American landscape and wondering how we could have thought this was a good idea, watch the 1939 documentary The City, a half-hour film produced by the American Institute of Planners.” By Sarah Goodyear, Atlantic Cities, Nov. 29, 2012.

Why “Green” Consumer Choices Can’t Win Climate Justice

“When it comes to energy policy, power is not evenly distributed.” -by George Lakey, Nation of Change, Sept. 28, 2012.

Wake Up Call From The Arctic

“The implications for global climate and weather, and for animals and people in the North, are enormous.” -by David Suzuki, Nation of Change, September 9, 2012

Food shortages could force world into vegetarianism, warn scientists

“Water scarcity’s effect on food production means radical steps will be needed to feed population expected to reach 9bn by 2050.”-by John Vidal, environment editor, guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 August 2012.

Addressing Looming Climate Bankruptcy

“Just as unsustainable debts and freewheeling lending practices reduced the resilience of personal and national financial systems, so our mounting climate debt is warming the earth and reducing the resilience of our food, water and social systems.” -Evan Gervetz and Frank Lowenstein, Nation of Change, August 19, 2012

Rising Tide — Environmental Refuges

“Despite their numbers, and their need, most nations refuse to recognize their status.” -Andrew Lam, New America Media, August 16, 2012.

The New Math of Global Warming

“Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – and that make clear who the real enemy is.”-Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, July 19,2012.

Your Climate on Steroids

“You don’t need science to tell you it’s been really crazy hot lately in much of the United States. But seriously, it’s been really stinking hot. How hot? Well, the last 12 months have been the hottest since recorded-keeping started in 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”-by Kate Shepherd, Mother Jones News, July 11, 2012.

Colorado’s table was set for monster fire

Washington Post, July 1, 2012

Acidic step: outsourcing our oysters

“In another apparent casualty of carbon emissions, a local oyster grower has opened a hatchery in Hawaii, finding the waters there more hospitable to fragile baby oysters than Willapa Bay.” -Danny Westneat, Seattle Times, June 23, 2012.

World Carbon Emissions Up 48% Since First Rio Climate Summit

The Guardian Data Blog, June 24, 2012.

Who Do You Trust, Mother Nature or Mr. Wizard?

“We humans appear to be propelling Earth into a “new normal” through soaring carbon emissions, deforestation, ocean acidification, and a laundry list of other assorted global impacts. Geoscientists have pretty much agreed to call this new period the “Anthropocene,” to reflect the fact that planetary systems are now being shaped substantially by human activity.”-Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute, June 20, 2012

Scientists: If We Don’t Act Now We’re Screwed

“Solutions to the world’s ongoing global environmental crisis are not mysterious. Scientists and experts urge a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, ending harmful subsidies, conservation of global biodiversity, protection of standing forests, an overhaul of fisheries and ocean management, increasing energy efficiency and access, transforming agricultural systems, changing measurements of national success to focus on human well-being over GDP, and combating overpopulation through education and contraceptive access.”-By Jeremy Hance, Mongabay News, 19 June 12

Smogiest May in Five Years

June 12, 2012

What Will It Take to Slow the World’s ‘Unsustainable Path’?

June8, 2012
“The dead hand of inertia that holds back progress on climate change negotiations also presides, with very few exceptions, over efforts to address every other environmental challenge.”– Robert Walker

The Planet Wreckers

June 4, 2012
It’s been a tough few weeks for the forces of climate-change denial.–by Bill McKibben

Warming gas levels hit ‘troubling milestone’

May 31, 2012
Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. The number isn’t quite a surprise, because it’s been rising at an accelerating pace. Years ago, it passed the 350 ppm mark that many scientists say is the highest safe level for carbon dioxide. It now stands globally at 395.

This Spring Was the Hottest Ever

May 29, 2012
In case, you know, you haven’t been outside in the past three months, it’s about to become official: unless a freak blizzard blankets the country by Thursday, the spring of 2012 will go down as the warmest for the U.S. in 117 years of record-keeping.

Consumption of Earth’s resources is unsustainable

The Earth’s population is depleting our planet’s natural resources at a rate faster than what is needed for those resources to be replenished, putting increased pressure on biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, according to a new report by the World Wildlife Fund.

Game Over for the Planet

GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.” If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.-James Hansen, New York Times (op ed)

Fukushima radiation now detected in the U.S. food supply

-J. D. Heyes, May 30, 2012.

Major change in direction needed for survival

Club of Rome
The book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, by Jorgen Randers, launched by the Club of Rome on May 7, raises the possibility that humankind might not survive on the planet if it continues on its path of over-consumption and short-termism.