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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>June 28, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[brief video]<br>
<b>'The worst is yet to come': Draft UN climate report warns of
drastic changes over 30 years</b><br>
Jun 23, 2021<br>
FRANCE 24 English<br>
#Climatechange will fundamentally reshape life on #Earth in the
coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming
#greenhousegas emissions, according to a landmark draft report from
the #UN's climate science advisors obtained by AFP. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NML_76FcY7E">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NML_76FcY7E</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
[CBS calls it an Omega Block]<br>
<b>Pacific Northwest bakes under once in a millennium heat dome</b><br>
The heat wave baking the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British
Columbia, Canada, is of an intensity never recorded by modern
humans. By one measure it is more rare than a once in a 1,000 year
event — which means that if you could live in this particular spot
for 1,000 years, you'd likely only experience a heat dome like this
once, if ever. <br>
<br>
Portland, Oregon, has already broken its all-time record hottest
temperature at 108 degrees on Saturday and the peak of the heat wave
has not even been reached yet. Canada is expected to register the
nation's all-time highest temperature before the event is done.
These are extremely dangerous numbers, especially in a region not
used to heat like this, where many people do not have air
conditioning.<br>
<br>
By Monday, some — if not all — of the all-time record highs seen
below are forecast to break, with many more cities not listed here
expected to achieve the same feat.<br>
The heat is being caused by a combination of a significant
atmospheric blocking pattern on top of a human-caused climate
changed world where baseline temperatures are already a couple to a
few degrees higher than nature intended...<br>
- -<br>
Turns out, the models were correct and we should expect extreme heat
waves, even unprecedented ones like this to become more routine.
"There is no context really, in the sense that there is no analog in
our past for what we are likely to see this week," says Dr. Michael
Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State
and author of the new book The New Climate War.<br>
<br>
But calling it a new normal does not suffice says Mann, "Some people
called this a 'new normal. But it is worse than that," explained
Mann. "We will continue to see more and more extreme heat waves,
droughts, wildfires and floods as long as we continue to warm the
planet through fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions." <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/heat-dome-2021-seattle-portland-weather/">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/heat-dome-2021-seattle-portland-weather/</a><br>
- -<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1408602303876124672">https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1408602303876124672</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://cbsnews3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2021/06/27/c402e6a8-eb97-4a29-a4c4-0f353f7f88f0/65faaed647742ccd63dfb7835c2cd8f2/2017summerheatpreppackage-bellcurve-animated-en-title-sm.gif">https://cbsnews3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2021/06/27/c402e6a8-eb97-4a29-a4c4-0f353f7f88f0/65faaed647742ccd63dfb7835c2cd8f2/2017summerheatpreppackage-bellcurve-animated-en-title-sm.gif</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[The Guardian article 5 years ago ]<br>
<b>Omega block is nature's secret weapon</b><br>
The mechanism that brought floods to the Ile de France and a
prolonged heatwave to the American Midwest is still not fully
understood<br>
David Hambling - 16 Jun 2016 -<br>
- -<br>
This type of block can remain in place for weeks, preventing the
normal eastward progression of weather systems. Last month’s
blocking high fixed a low pressure area over western Europe. Bad
weather persisted, and rather than producing passing showers, the
clouds dropped all their rain in the same place. There was record
rainfall in the Ile de France region around Paris.<br>
The same phenomenon brings weeks of fine weather. A month before
Europe suffered a deluge, the American Midwest enjoyed a prolonged
spell of dry, sunny days from a more benign omega block. But the
blocks can be bad news in the US too, amplifying severe storms and
producing tornadoes even in areas that are normally free of them, as
happened in 2014.<br>
<br>
The mechanism of blocking is still not well understood. We do not
know why some weather systems anchor themselves while others do not.
So in a sense, the omega block, bringer of extreme weather, really
is nature’s secret weapon.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/16/omega-block-natures-secret-weapon-weatherwatch">https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/16/omega-block-natures-secret-weapon-weatherwatch</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[XR Activism report from SkyNews]<br>
<b>Climate change: Seven tonnes of horse manure dumped outside
newspaper offices at Extinction Rebellion rally</b><br>
Campaigners say a small number of billionaires control most UK
newspapers and are little more than establishment mouthpieces.<br>
Sunday 27 June 2021 <br>
Hundreds of Extinction Rebellion (XR) protesters have marched
through London in a demonstration aimed at the British press.<br>
<br>
The Metropolitan Police said 23 people were arrested during the
rally, including a handful who were involved in seven tonnes of
horse manure being dumped outside the Daily Mail offices in
Kensington, central London...<br>
- - <br>
XR co-founder Dr Gail Bradbook told Sky News: "When the power of the
press is held in the hands of too few, we don't have a functioning
democracy.<br>
<br>
"This is a serious problem. We are running out of time, and the
press isn't holding the government to account."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://news.sky.com/story/seven-tonnes-of-horse-manure-dumped-outside-newspaper-offices-at-extinction-rebellion-rally-12343413">https://news.sky.com/story/seven-tonnes-of-horse-manure-dumped-outside-newspaper-offices-at-extinction-rebellion-rally-12343413</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Yes, the worst]<br>
<b>Dire impact of climate change to hit sooner than anticipated:
IPCC</b><br>
Jun 23, 2021<br>
Arirang News<br>
The devastating impact of climate change is on track to hit much
sooner than previously anticipated.<br>
This according to a UN report that says that human life will be
reshaped in the next decades,...even with further a reduction of
greenhouse gas emissions.<br>
Choi Min-jung reports.<br>
<br>
Pointing out the "worst is yet to come",… climate experts are
warning that people should expect to witness the dire consequences
of drastic climate change within 30 years.<br>
This is according to a draft report from the United Nation's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,… accessed exclusively by
AFP.<br>
The draft warns of the severe impacts climate change will have on
the planet,... including weather, food production, and eco-systems.<br>
The report also draws attention to the effect of global warming on
humanity,… warning that "life on Earth can recover from a drastic
climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new
ecosystems",…. however humans cannot.<br>
<br>
The draft reports went on to say that a rise in global temperatures
by more than 1-point-5 degrees Celsius will bring irreversible
consequences.<br>
However, the earth's temperature has already risen by 1-point-1
degrees compared to pre-industrial levels,… and looking at the
current trend, experts say it may even reach 3 degrees.<br>
This is well above the goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which
aims to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius.<br>
Even with 2-hundred nations abiding by the agreement, 14-percent of
the global population will be exposed to severe heatwaves at least
once in 5 years.<br>
The IPCC stresses that it is crucial for all levels of society,...
from individuals, businesses, to governments,... to do their parts
to avoid the worst-case scenario.<br>
Choi Min-jung, Arirang News.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmG0pNO_N9U">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmG0pNO_N9U</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[pay discrepancy]<br>
<b>These are the hotshot firefighters leading attacks against
California wildfires. And they're quitting</b><br>
(CNN)A swirling tornado of flames reaching 40,000 feet into the sky
tore through a California city in 2018, leaving a veteran hotshot
firefighter horrified.<br>
<br>
The fire tornado, which obliterated entire neighborhoods in Redding,
California, during the massive Carr Fire, still haunts former
hotshot supervisor Aaron Humphrey. He says that terrifying moment
forever changed his outlook.<br>
"You are in a fog and expecting death or disaster around every
corner ... It collectively killed my hotshot spirit," Humphrey, 44,
said of the fire tornado.<br>
"Hump," as fellow firefighters and friends call him, supervised
hotshot crews from the US Forest Service on blister-inducing hikes
to dig out fire lines, hack down trees and set blazes to fight
advancing flames. Hotshot crews of 20 to 22 people spearhead fire
attacks, and it's not uncommon for them to hike 10 miles daily with
fire gear packs that can weigh up to 45 pounds.<br>
Hump rose up from a seasonal rookie firefighter to the prestigious
position of supervisor of the Eldorado Hotshots. He called it the
"best job in the world."<br>
But he quit a year ago.<br>
After 25 years, Hump says he became just the latest mentally fried,
underpaid hotshot veteran to leave, at a time when California
wildfires are at their worst...<br>
- -<br>
First-year federal hotshots make $13.50 an hour, according to David
Alicea, vice president of the Forest Service Union in California...<br>
- - <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/26/us/california-wildfires-hotshot-firefighter-shortage/index.html">https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/26/us/california-wildfires-hotshot-firefighter-shortage/index.html</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>[Anglo Americans have been doing this for centuries]<b><br>
</b><b>Dispossessed, Again: Climate Change Hits Native Americans
Especially Hard</b><br>
Many Native people were forced into the most undesirable areas of
America, first by white settlers, then by the government. Now,
parts of that marginal land are becoming uninhabitable.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/climate/climate-Native-Americans.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/climate/climate-Native-Americans.html</a><br>
<br>
<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[NYTimes ponders]<br>
<b>What if American Democracy Fails the Climate Crisis?</b><br>
Ezra Klein and four environmental thinkers discuss the limits of
politics in facing down the threat to the planet.<br>
<br>
<b>Kim Stanley Robinson: </b>Well, we are stuck in an international
system of nation-states, and we don’t have time to invent and
institute any kind of alternative world governance, so we have to
use what we’ve got. But we also have the Paris agreement, and
climate equity was written into it so that developed rich nations
were tasked with paying more and doing more and helping the
historically disadvantaged and even colonized nations. Executing all
that is, of course, a different story...<br>
..It is a fragile system. It could become like the League of
Nations. In the future, to the extent that there will be historians,
they may look back and say it was a good idea that failed. People
may look back to our time and say, Here was a crux, and then they
blew it. This is the power of the basic science-fictional exercise
of looking at our own time as if from the future, thus judging
ourselves as actors in creating history. From that imaginary
perspective, it can sometimes become blazingly obvious what we
should do now. Parochial concerns over quarterly returns or the
selfish privileges of currently existing wealthy people fade to
insignificance when you take the long view and see us teetering on
the edge of causing a mass-extinction event that would hammer all
future living creatures.<br>
- -<br>
<b>Saul Griffith:</b> It’s not even remotely close to sufficient.
But something extraordinary did happen when the Biden administration
came out and said it was aiming for a 50 percent reduction in
emissions by 2030. It may not be binding, but that is enormously
more ambitious than John F. Kennedy standing up and saying we’ll go
to the moon by the end of the decade. We knew how to build rockets,
and we knew where the moon was. We don’t know all the answers of
where we’re going.<br>
<br>
Now you see, basically daily, the news stories of automobile
companies bringing forward the date of the last time they’re going
to produce the internal-combustion-engine car. It’s gone from 2050
for most companies last year to 2030, and some are talking 2025. We
might just be at the very beginning of the reinforcing cycle of
ambition begetting more commitment, which begets more ambition. We
are absolutely not even remotely on track yet. But this, I think, is
what it feels like as you start to ramp up...<br>
- -<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/magazine/ezra-klein-climate-crisis.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/magazine/ezra-klein-climate-crisis.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Climate Fiction]<br>
<b>Stories to save the world: the new wave of climate fiction</b><br>
Now more than ever, novelists are facing up to the unthinkable: the
climate crisis. Claire Armitstead talks to Margaret Atwood, Amitav
Ghosh and more about the new cli-fi<br>
Claire Armitstead - Sat 26 Jun 2021 <br>
<br>
In September 2017, David Simon, creator of The Wire, tweeted a
photograph of golfers calmly lining up their putts on an Oregon
course as wildfires raged in the background. “In the pantheon of
visual metaphors for America today, this is the money shot,” he
wrote of the picture, which was taken by an amateur photographer who
spotted the photo-op as she was about to skydive out of a plane.
Everything about this story – the image, the circumstances – seems
stranger than fiction.<br>
<br>
A year before Simon’s tweet, in a landmark polemic, The Great
Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Indian novelist
Amitav Ghosh had questioned why so few writers – himself included –
were tackling the world’s most pressing issue in their fiction. But
now, as extreme weather swirls around the globe, melting glaciers,
burning forests, flooding districts and annihilating species, the
climate emergency has brought the unimaginable into our daily lives
and literature. A survivor in Jessie Greengrass’s haunting new novel
The High House sums it up: “The whole complicated system of
modernity which had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling …
and we were becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and
frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark. Somehow while
we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things
which added up to living, the future had slipped into the
present.”...<br>
- -<br>
Greengrass is among a growing number of novelists who are
confronting this unfolding catastrophe through the young genre of
climate fiction – or “cli-fi”. Among the new arrivals are the Irish
writer Niall Bourke, whose novel Line conjures the Boschian image of
refugees queueing for generations in an arid land; and Bethany
Clift, whose Last One at the Party is the diary of an unnamed
thirtysomething who decides to revel her way to the end, as the sole
survivor of a pandemic. In August, Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New
Under the Sun will take us to a climate-ravaged near-future
California. And in September, Anthony Doerr will follow his
Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See with Cloud Cuckoo
Land, set between 15th-century Constantinople, Idaho in 2020 and
space some time in the future. Doerr has said of the book: “The
world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate
instability, pandemics, disinformation. I wanted this novel to
reflect those anxieties, but also offer meaningful hope.”<br>
<br>
So what has changed since Ghosh published The Great Derangement? “I
think that the world has changed us, and the inflection point was
2018,” he says now. “It was partly because there were so many
extreme climate events that year – the California wildfires,
flooding in India, a succession of brutal hurricanes – but partly
also because of the publication of Richard Powers’s The Overstory.”<br>
<br>
This is a big claim to make for a novel. His point, says Ghosh, is
not just about the book itself, but the welcome it received
(including being shortlisted for the Booker prize). “It wasn’t hived
off into the usual silos of climate change or speculative fiction,
but was treated as a mainstream novel. I do think that was a very
major thing. Since then, there’s been an outpouring of work in this
area. In my own personal inbox, I get two or three manuscripts a
day.”<br>
<br>
Powers’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel reduces human lives to slim
growth rings in the bigger history of trees, with characters whose
separate stories fleetingly intersect as they circle around a series
of confrontations between individuals and institutions, conscience
and greed, that will determine the future of humanity. The Canadian
writer Michael Christie repeated this structure two years later in a
lively eco-parable Greenwood, set between 1908 and 2038, when a
virulent new fungus is killing off all trees in what is known as
“the great withering”.<br>
<br>
At the heart of both novels is a debate about what constitutes life
itself. In The Overstory, a research scientist is cast into the
wilderness for daring to suggest that trees have their own forms of
consciousness and community, while an entrepreneurial computer geek
realises that they hold the secret to everything. In Greenwood,
Jake, a tourist guide at a futuristic nature theme park, reflects:
“Even when a tree is at its most vital, only ten per cent of its
tissue – the outermost rings, its sapwood – can be called alive.
Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its
ancestors.”<br>
<br>
FIRST USE SAT REV JUNE 2018 Author Richard S Powers poses for a
portrait in Great Smokeys National Park in Tennessee near where he
lives on Tuesday May 22, 2018. Powers’ recently released The
Overstory blends multiple narratives relating to trees.<br>
‘A very major thing’ ... Richard Powers, in Great Smokeys National
Park in Tennessee. Photograph: Mike Belleme<br>
This isn’t so fanciful, given the “rights of nature” movement, which
Robert Macfarlane has described as “the new animism”. Two years ago,
Macfarlane reported on a move by residents of the US city of Toledo
to draw up an emergency “bill of rights” for Lake Eyrie, granting it
legal personhood and according it rights in law to “exist, flourish,
and naturally evolve”. But it wasn’t quite that simple. “Ecosystems
are not human, and they certainly don’t bear human
responsibilities,” argued the bill’s organisers. “Rather, nature
requires its own unique rights that recognise its needs and
characteristics.”<br>
<br>
The bill revealed just how difficult it is for our existing legal
and intellectual frameworks to accommodate the idea of a reality
beyond the human. “The [climate] crisis demands a form of literary
expression that lifts it out of the realm of intellectual knowing
and lodges it deep in readers’ bodies,” wrote a perceptive reviewer,
in response to an Amazon collection of standalone cli-fi stories,
Warmer, published in 2018.<br>
<br>
So what are the stories we need and how do we unlock them? “There
are many different kinds of stories one might tell but there are no
general answers when it comes to novel writing, only specific ones,”
says Margaret Atwood, whose MaddAddam trilogy explores what might
happen in the aftermath of environmental collapse. Cli-fi often
rests on the familiar trope of a nightmarish new reality unleashed
by a catastrophic event. In John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall,
“the change” has eroded beaches and made Britain into a fortress
state, patrolled by young defenders under instruction to destroy any
boat that approaches. Kate Sawyer’s debut novel, The Stranding,
published on 24 June, opens with the striking image of two strangers
who save themselves from a life-obliterating radiation event by
sheltering in the mouth of a beached whale.<br>
<br>
Both The High House and Rumaan Alam’s 2020 hit, Leave the World
Behind, do something a bit different. Alam strands his characters in
a Long Island holiday home, cut off from “civilisation” by a
cataclysm that presents itself as a mysterious noise, a noise so
extreme that it seems to transcend sound. “You didn’t hear such a
noise: you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it.
You could fairly say their lives could be divided into two: the
period before they’d heard that noise and the period after,” he
writes. In The High House, self-sufficiency is made possible by a
barn thoughtfully stocked by the scientist mother of one of the
characters with the tools of a past civilisation – trainers, and
tinned foods.<br>
<br>
Greengrass describes her novel as “a sort of prequel” to Russell
Hoban’s great dystopian fantasy Riddley Walker, where – in the
absence of writing materials – language has degraded and mutated.
Her East Anglia, like Alam’s Long Island, is on the way to becoming
a dystopia, without actually yet being one. The characters of both
novels are trapped between the “before” and the “after”, in
precisely the sort of limbo that makes the environmental breakdown
so hard to write about.<br>
<br>
Apocalyptic fiction has long thrummed with biblical imagery, from
the hymn-singing “God’s gardeners” of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of
the Flood to the “burning bush” of orange butterflies in Barbara
Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. Both The High House and The Stranding
invoke the story of Noah’s Ark, creating sealed-off family
communities while implicitly asking what such survival could mean in
a world without olive trees, or doves.<br>
<br>
In the novel Gun Island – his 2019 answer to his own provocation –
Ghosh deploys myth and mysticism, and the historic movement of
languages, animals and people around the globe. The novel climaxes
in a mass migration of whales and dolphins, an implausible freak
event that is also an observable physical phenomenon. At its heart
is a reclamation of the “uncanny”, defined by Freud as an effect
produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and
reality.<br>
<br>
Alam also uses the uncanny to slice through the hyper-real surface
of Leave the World Behind, most strikingly with a flock of flamingos
that land in the backyard swimming pool. “They’re comic and
unsettling,” says the novelist. “They’re a colour that doesn’t feel
like it should exist in nature, but of course it does. And they
certainly shouldn’t be in the American northeast. It’s like coming
across a zebra in the middle of London. It feels to me a little
mythic, a little like the arrival of Zeus as a swan.”<br>
<br>
It is also a strangely scary visitation. “I think that we have had
all of these moments in the news that are frightening and strange,
and we have to think of them as uncanny because they seem to contain
something that we can’t comprehend right now,” says Alam. He cites
shocking images of drowned children from refugee boats washed up on
beaches. “Those were real people, and there is so much heartbreak
and shame for us to bear in these moments. But there is also
something very hard to figure out about them: an unexplained child
washed up on the shore almost feels like something out of folktale.”<br>
<br>
Like Gun Island, Leave the World Behind is a deliberately hybrid
novel – part social comedy, part speculative chiller. Hybridity is
emerging as one way of addressing the central contradiction between
what we are (social beings with lives constructed from familiar
rituals) and what confronts us (an elimination so total that, as
Greengrass writes, “there won’t be memorials in church halls. No one
is going to make up songs. There will be nothing left”).<br>
<br>
In The Last Migration, the Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy
slips between the magical, the speculative and the domestic in a
compelling ocean-going yarn that tracks the world’s last migrating
birds across the high seas, in the hope that they may reveal the
whereabouts of the last fish. Its narrator, Franny, has a
sentimental attachment to one of the three tagged arctic terns she
is tracking. “I’ve taken to thinking of her as mine because she has
burrowed inside and made a home in my ribcage,” she says, when the
reality is that the bird is just a dot on a sonar panel, and finally
an absence.<br>
<br>
Jeff VanderMeer also embraces hybridity in Hummingbird Salamander,
abandoning his usual speculative fiction to spin a pacy thriller
plot around a missing eco-terrorist. “Using ‘us’ when thinking about
the environment erases all the different versions of ‘us’,” writes
the fugitive Silvina. “Many indigenous peoples don’t think this way.
Counterculture doesn’t always think this way. Philosophy, knowledge,
policy exist that could solve our problems already.”<br>
<br>
Other writers have squared up to the narrative challenge by refusing
to join the dots entirely, as Jenny Offill does so brilliantly in
her scorching short novel Weather, composed of sometimes random
paragraphs. Its narrator, Lizzie, is a librarian whose conscience is
besieged by catastrophe aphorisms (“first they came for the coral,
but I did not say anything because I was not a coral …”), while her
“monkey brain” worries about what will happen to her teeth in a
world without dentists, and her socialised one frets that she might
have got lipstick on them.<br>
<br>
It is not just overtly cli-fi novels that are investigating
fragmentation as a way of expressing our state of dismay and
disarray. In Sarah Moss’s Summerwater, holiday-makers struggle to
enjoy themselves in unseasonably heavy rain, oblivious to a natural
world that exists only in the parenthesis of standalone preludes to
each chapter: bees dying, ants walling themselves in. In Lucy
Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, a lioness tries to keep her cubs safe,
a narrative thread related outside the stream-of-consciousness of
the central character, who spews out the minutiae of her life over
1,030 pages.<br>
<br>
In their different ways, both Moss and Ellmann are addressing the
solipsism or self-centredness of consciousness, which got us into
this problem in the first place, and is both formed and enacted
through the stories we tell about ourselves. Their characters are
prisoners of what the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, in a visionary
Nobel lecture, described as “the polyphonic first-person narrative”,
which filters everything through the self of the storyteller.<br>
<br>
Tokarczuk, who laid out her environmental agenda in her
eco-whodunnit Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, called for
a return to the perspective of parable, and for the development of
what she called a “tender narrator”, a quantum version of the
omniscient narrator, capable of seeing in many dimensions. Quite how
this would work she didn’t know, because it had yet to be invented.
In the meantime, we should abandon traditional distinctions between
high- and lowbrow fiction and trust to fragments. “In this way,” she
said, literature can “set off the reader’s capacity to unite
fragments into a single design, and to discover entire
constellations in the small particles of events.”<br>
<br>
But as long as we continue to think and to tell stories, we are not
necessarily doomed. For decades Atwood’s novels have been sounding
the alarm about things that may not yet be visible, though they are
already coming to pass. “There is no inevitable The Future, just as
there is no inevitable Right Side of History. There is no inevitable
Road to Perdition, there is no inevitable Road to Oz,” she says.
“But there are consequences of actions, not all of them foreseeable.
Dark are the ways of wizards. And of novelists as well.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/26/stories-to-save-the-world-the-new-wave-of-climate-fiction">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/26/stories-to-save-the-world-the-new-wave-of-climate-fiction</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[new book discussion with the author - video]<br>
<b>Doom: A Conversation with Niall Ferguson on the Politics of
Catastrophe</b><br>
Jun 17, 2021<br>
Manhattan Institute<br>
As a deadly pandemic and civil unrest swept across the world last
year, “unprecedented” became the word of the hour. While 2020 was an
uncommon year, the tendency to think that our time has no historical
analogue is a common error—one that can have serious consequences if
it causes us to ignore the lessons of the past.<br>
<br>
Niall Ferguson’s new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, offers
a corrective, arguing that we must understand past calamities to put
today’s into proper perspective. Investigating the common features
of geological, geopolitical, biological, and technological
disasters, Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution,
offers a general theory of catastrophes and explains why our
responses to them so often falter.<br>
<br>
Please join the Manhattan Institute ... for a virtual book talk with
Niall Ferguson and City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson about Doom,
the history of catastrophes, and the lessons learned—and
forgotten—during the Covid-19 crisis.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LeBpTyPEQg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LeBpTyPEQg</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[The news archive - looking back] <font size="+1"><b><br>
</b></font><font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global
warming June 28, 2015</b></font><br>
June 28, 2015:<br>
In the Washington Post, Columbia University Law Professor Michael B.
Gerrard observes:<br>
<br>
"Toward the end of this century, if current trends are not reversed,
large parts of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan,
Egypt and Vietnam, among other countries, will be under water. Some
small island nations, such as Kiribati and the Marshall Islands,
will be close to disappearing entirely. Swaths of Africa from Sierra
Leone to Ethiopia will be turning into desert. Glaciers in the
Himalayas and the Andes, on which entire regions depend for drinking
water, will be melting away. Many habitable parts of the world will
no longer be able to support agriculture or produce clean water. <br>
<br>
"The people who live there will not sit passively by while they and
their children starve to death. Tens or hundreds of millions of
people will try very hard to go somewhere they can survive. They
will be hungry, thirsty, hot — and desperate. If the search for
safety involves piling into perilous boats and enduring miserable
and dangerous journeys, they will do it. They will cross borders,
regardless of whether they are welcome. And in their desperation,
they could become violent: Forced migration can exacerbate ethnic
and political tensions. Studies show that more heat tends to
increase violence.<br>
<br>
"The United Nations says the maximum tolerable increase in global
average temperatures is 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial
conditions. (Small island nations argued for a much lower figure; at
3.6 degrees, they’ll be gone.) But the promises that nations are
making ahead of the U.N. climate summit in Paris in December would
still, according to the International Energy Agency, lead the
average temperature to rise by about 4.7 degrees before the end of
the century. Those promises are voluntary and nonbinding, and if
they aren’t kept, the thermometer could go much higher. Which means
our children and grandchildren will be confronting a humanitarian
crisis unlike anything the world has ever faced.<br>
<br>
"Absent the political will to prevent it, the least we can do is to
start planning for it.<br>
<br>
"Rather than leaving vast numbers of victims of a warmer world
stranded, without any place allowing them in, industrialized
countries ought to pledge to take on a share of the displaced
population equal to how much each nation has historically
contributed to emissions of the greenhouse gases that are causing
this crisis."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-is-the-worst-polluter-in-the-history-of-the-world-we-should-let-climate-change-refugees-resettle-here/2015/06/25/28a55238-1a9c-11e5-ab92-c75ae6ab94b5_story.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-is-the-worst-polluter-in-the-history-of-the-world-we-should-let-climate-change-refugees-resettle-here/2015/06/25/28a55238-1a9c-11e5-ab92-c75ae6ab94b5_story.html</a>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<p>/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/</p>
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