The number of ships that have recently sunk off the South African coast is “just some surface-level indications that our shipping industry is utterly ill prepared for the rise of both overall sea levels and the ‘monster waves’ that accompany climate change,” writes Patrick Bond in an article for the Daily Maverick.
Bond criticises the South African government for building “carbon-intensive white elephants” when they should be focusing on environmentally conscious policy that takes into account predictions on climate change such as those in the latest report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He writes that our local government is being misled by reports that are “climate-denialist” and “ridiculously outdated”.
The northern hemisphere summer just peaked. Though the torrid heat is now ebbing, it is abundantly evident the climate crisis is far more severe than most scientists had anticipated. The latest report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a notoriously conservative research agency, will be debated in Stockholm next month but no one can deny its projections: “widespread melting of land ice, extreme heat waves, difficulty growing food and massive changes in plant and animal life, probably including a wave of extinctions.”
But it gets even worse. A giant Arctic Ocean “belch” of 50-billion tonnes of methane is inexorably escaping from seabed permafrost, according to scientists writing in the journal Nature. The ice at the North Pole is now, at maximum summer heat, only 40 percent as thick as it was just 40 years ago, a crisis only partially represented in the vivid image of a temporary lake that submerged the pole area last month. The damage that will unfold after the burp, according to leading researchers from Cambridge and Erasmus Universities, could cost R600-trillion, about a year’s world economic output. Global warming will speed up by 15-35 years as a result.
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- Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below by Patrick Bond
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EAN: 9781869142216
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