More than 1,000 Vancouverites filled the CBC Plaza on Sunday, joining hundreds of thousands more around the world as 125 world leaders prepare to converge on New York City Tuesday in an historic UN summit on climate change.
Tens of thousands filled the streets of New York City in what organizers say may be one of the largest climate change rallies ever held in the U.S. (Michael Poland/Twitter)
Rallies are underway or have happened in New York City, London, Berlin, Paris, Rio, Toronto and Seattle. More than 2,000 events were registered in more than 130 countries.
Last year, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern that the world's commitment to mitigate climate change was insufficient. Indeed, in today's Lancet, a Comment by Andy Haines and others provides a stark reminder of the likely adverse effects on human health should fossil fuel consumption and high population growth continue at their present levels. They call for the health community to take a longer term view, where actions that target climate change and health today will reduce the global burden of ill-health in the future.
Carbon dioxide emissions, the main contributor to global warming, are set to rise again in 2014 - reaching a record high of 40 billion tonnes.
The 2.5 per cent projected rise in burning fossil fuels is revealed by the Global Carbon Project, which is co-led in the UK by researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia and the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the University of Exeter.
The People’s Climate March on Sunday in New York City and numerous other cities including Vancouver, promises to be the biggest day of protest in the history of the climate movement. Will Canadians turn out?
On September 3rd, I attended the only Canadian stop of the People's Climate Tour at Montreal's Concordia University. Many gathered in the auditorium to witness a skit by climate justice activists, a photographer's powerful images of communities who will be facing the brunt of the Energy East Pipeline, and speeches by anti-racist activist Shaina Agbayani, human rights activist from Kanehsatà:ke Ellen Gabriel, and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben.
Viking I landed on Mars, the Ramones released their first album, the Soweto Uprising began in South Africa, North and South Vietnam reunified to become the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and Gerald Ford was in the White House. 1976: The same year scientists discovered that refrigerant chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons, better known as CFCs, were responsible for creating a hole in the ozone layer was also the last time when global average temperatures were below the 20th century norm.
The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the most worrisome so far. Paired with data from the 2014 National Climate Assessment, there is no question that the climate crisis is here and is accelerating at a faster pace than predicted. Its effects are widespread and dangerous, yet real solutions are being suppressed.
It's necessary to "degrow" the "corporate food regime" that over last five decades has impoverished the climate, water resources, local communities and crop diversity, and has not solved the problem of hunger.
This was the argument made by Eric Holt-Giménez, Executive Director of Food First, an organization whose mission is to work towards ending hunger by bringing about food justice, at a presentation Friday at the Fourth International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, which took place in Leipzig, Germany.
The 1972 book Limits to Growth, which predicted our civilisation would probably collapse some time this century, has been criticised as doomsday fantasy since it was published. Back in 2002, self-styled environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the “dustbin of history”.
It doesn’t belong there. Research from the University of Melbourne has found the book’s forecasts are accurate, 40 years on. If we continue to track in line with the book’s scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.
. . . in her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (due in stores September 16), Klein casts her gaze toward the future, arguing that the dangers of climate change demand radical action now to ward off catastrophe.
