Monthly Archives: November 2015

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23 November 2015, Reuters, Weather disasters occur almost daily, becoming more frequent -UN. Weather-related disasters such as floods and heatwaves have occurred almost daily in the past decade, almost twice as often as two decades ago, with Asia being the hardest hit region, a U.N. report said on Monday. While the report authors could not pin the increase wholly on climate change, they did say that the upward trend was likely to continue as extreme weather events increased. Since 1995, weather disasters have killed 606,000 people, left 4.1 billion injured, homeless or in need of aid, and accounted for 90 percent of all disasters, it said. A recent peak year was 2002, when drought in India hit 200 million and a sandstorm inChina affected 100 million. But the standout mega-disaster was Cyclone Nargis, which killed 138,000 in Myanmar in 2008. While geophysical causes such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis often grab the headlines, they only make up one in 10 of the disasters trawled from a database defined by the impact. The report, called “The Human Cost of Weather Related Disasters”, found there were an average of 335 weather-related disasters annually between 2005 and August this year, up 14 percent from 1995-2004 and almost twice as many as in the years from 1985 to 1994. “While scientists cannot calculate what percentage of this rise is due to climate change, predictions of more extreme weather in future almost certainly mean that we will witness a continued upward trend in weather-related disasters in the decades ahead,” the report said. Read More here

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23 November 2015, Aljazeera, Siberia’s melting permafrost fuels climate change. Over the past year, a number of giant, mysterious holes have emerged in Siberia, some as deep as 200 metres. Scientists say the craters may be emerging because the frozen ground, or “permafrost”, that covers much of Siberia has been thawing due to climate change, allowing methane gases trapped underground to build up and explode. Permafrost is ground that is permanently frozen, where the ground temperature has remained below zero degrees Celsius for at least two years. It covers about a quarter of the northern hemisphere’s land surface. When permafrost thaws, microbes digest the plant and animal remains that were locked in the permafrost and release greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. The phenomenon is a self-feeding cycle, explained Sarah Chadburn, from the University of Exeter. “Permafrost soils contain vast amounts of carbon, nearly twice as much as is currently in the atmosphere. As the permafrost thaws in a warming climate, the soil decomposes and releases carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane. These are greenhouse gases, and they warm the Earth even more. This leads to more permafrost thawing, more carbon release, and so the cycle continues,” Chadburn said. Read More here

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21 November 2015, The Guardian. Naomi Klein, What’s really at stake at the Paris climate conference now marches are banned. Whose security gets protected by any means necessary? Whose security is casually sacrificed, despite the means to do so much better? Those are the questions at the heart of the climate crisis, and the answers are the reason climate summits so often end in acrimony and tears. The French government’s decision to ban protests, marches and other “outdoor activities” during the Paris climate summit is disturbing on many levels. The one that preoccupies me most has to do with the way it reflects the fundamental inequity of the climate crisis itself – and that core question of whose security is ultimately valued in our lopsided world. Here is the first thing to understand. The people facing the worst impacts of climate change have virtually no voice in western debates about whether to do anything serious to prevent catastrophic global warming. Huge climate summits like the one coming up in Paris are rare exceptions. For just two weeks every few years, the voices of the people who are getting hit first and worst get a little bit of space to be heard at the place where fateful decisions are made. That’s why Pacific islanders and Inuit hunters and low-income people of colour from places like New Orleans travel for thousands of miles to attend. The expense is enormous, in both dollars and carbon, but being at the summit is a precious chance to speak about climate change in moral terms and to put a human face to this unfolding catastrophe.The next thing to understand is that even in these rare moments, frontline voices do not have enough of a platform in the official climate meetings, in which the microphone is dominated by governments and large, well-funded green groups. The voices of ordinary people are primarily heard in grassroots gatherings parallel to the summit, as well as in marches and protests, which in turn attract media coverage. Now the French government has decided to take away the loudest of these megaphones, claiming that securing marches would compromise its ability to secure the official summit zone where politicians will meet. Once again, the message is: our security is non-negotiable, yours is up for grabs. Some say this is all fair game against the backdrop of terror. But a UN climate summit is not like a meeting of the G8 or the World Trade Organisation, where the powerful meet and the powerless try to crash their party. Parallel “civil society” events are not an addendum to, or distractions from, the main event. They are integral to the process. Which is why the French government should never have been allowed to decide which parts of the summit it would cancel and which it would still hold. Read More here

 

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20 November 2015, The Guardian, Organisers of cancelled Paris climate march urge global show of support. People around the world should protest ‘on behalf of those who can’t’, say organisers of climate march forbidden in light of Paris terror attacks. A march expected to attract 200,000 people onto the streets of Paris ahead of crunch UN climate change talks was forbidden by the French government on Wednesday in light of last Friday’s terror attacks. But organisers have said it is now even more important for people around the world to come out onto the streets for “the biggest global climate march in history” to protest “on behalf of those who can’t”. There are 2,173 events organised in more than 150 countries around the world on 28 and 29 November. You can find your nearest event here: The events are designed to put pressure on the leaders from almost 200 countries who will meet in Paris to thrash out a new deal on limiting greenhouse gas emissions post-2020. The conference is considered the most significant since the talks in Copenhagen in 2009, which were widely considered a failure by environmentalists. Emma Ruby-Sachs, deputy director of Avaaz , which has organised the march said: “The tragic attacks in Paris have made the march there impossible. Now it’s even more important for people everywhere to march on the weekend of 29 November on behalf of those who can’t, and show that we are more determined than ever to meet the challenges facing humanity with hope, not fear.” Read More here