Imperiled Life. Javier Sethness

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СКАЧАТЬ in the seventeenth century, and the latter the driest spring in more than a century.[48] Climate overheating is also the likely culprit for the spectacular drought suffered in China in 2011, which drove Chinese authorities to release some five billion cubic meters of water from behind the infamous Three Gorges Dam for irrigation and personal use.[49] Anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate systems is clearly seen as well in the catastrophic failure of rains in the Horn of Africa in 2011 and the attendant drought, found by the United Nations to be the worst in six decades.[50] This devastating event left some 13 million individuals at risk of dying from starvation—a number that included millions of children, thousands of whom have perished to date.[51] It is this event, together with the ongoing torturous civil conflict in the region, that has seen thousands of desperate Somalis arriving daily at the Dadaab ­refugee camp in Kenya, a settlement originally established two decades ago to house 90,000 persons, but now populated by some 500,000; it is this event that has brought about the conditions for the emergence of malnutrition rates of 58 percent among children in Somalia’s Bay region, and thus the potential death of three-quarters of a million people, as the United Nations warns.[52]

      These disconcerting events have taken place in just the past two years. In addition to the 2003 heat waves in Europe, episodes of drought in western North America (1994–2004) and Central and Southwest Asia (1998–2003) along with flooding in Europe (2002) are “consistent,” in the IPCC’s words, with “physically based expectations arising from climate change.”[53] It is estimated that China loses 965 square miles to desertification annually; increased sea levels have already begun to sterilize the soils of Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands, hampering the cultivation of taro in both island groups.[54] In Kiribati, rising sea levels are salinizing the water supplies; on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta rivers, they are forcing agriculturists to abandon rice cultivation en masse.[55] Lake Chad in the Sahel has been reduced to 10 percent of its size only forty years ago, and Lake Tanganyika was observed in mid-2010 to have higher temperatures than at any other time in the past fifteen hundred years and is warming at an unprecedented rate.[56] The world’s oceans are 30 percent more acidic now than a century ago.[57] Glaciers across the globe are in steady retreat, with 75 percent of the Himalayan glaciers now classified this way according to a March 2011 study.[58] Temperatures observed in Tibet in 2010 reached highs not previously seen in the past five decades of record keeping.[59] Peru’s glaciers have lost 22 percent of their surface area over the past few decades.[60]

      Oxfam reports that flooding and extreme storm disaster events have tripled in impoverished southern societies since the 1980s.[61] As Edward S. Herman and David Peterson note, the genocidal conflict in Darfur may have found some of its basis in the climate change that has already occurred.[62] A recent Columbia University study found that historical conflict in southern societies were twice as likely in years with an active El Niño Southern Oscillation, which in drastically decreasing rainfall patterns over much of the tropics—Africa, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia—simulate the conditions that further climate destabilization can be expected to bring about.[63] Mike Davis’s findings that the historical synergy between late nineteenth-century El Niño events and the onset of capitalist colonialism in India, China, and much of Africa produced the worst famines recorded in human history—ones that killed between 30 and 60 million people—take on new meaning in light of today’s climate change.[64]

      To date, then, climate change has proven disastrous, yet the threats posed by climate destabilization will likely be far more severe in the near future. The following examines some of the climatological findings regarding our downward spiral toward climate catastrophe—an eventuality that is promised without a rational and revolutionary intervention to check it.

      In its 2007 Fourth Annual Report, the IPCC offers its worst-case scenario of a 6.4ºC (11.2°F) increase in average temperatures by the end of the twenty-first century as being based on the lack of any sort of sensible mitigating policies and the reproduction of fossil-fuel-intensive capitalist growth. The report states that a 2ºC (3.6ºF) increase in average temperatures is associated with an atmospheric carbon concentration of about 500 ppm, a 3ºC (5.25ºF) rise with 600 ppm, and a 5ºC–6ºC (8.75–11.2ºF) increase with 900–1,000 ppm.[65] As has already been noted, humanity presently finds itself tied to a trajectory that would see the realization of this 6ºC increase by the century’s end. The UK Met Office maintains that a 4ºC (7ºF) increase by the year 2060 is entirely possible. Anderson’s predictions for life in a world warmer by 4ºC, mentioned above, is relevant here, as is Hansen and his colleagues’ determination that the current warming rate is progressing between ten and a thousand times more rapidly than the nearly terminal extinction rate at the end of the end of the Permian era.[66]

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