GILBERT MERCIER—ime is up! All humans, men and women, are guilty as charged! Guilty of abusing other species and the natural world we depend on; guilty, either by greed or ignorance, of abusing other species that sustain our own and driving them to expedient extinction. Wild life, big and small, is briskly moving towards a vanishing point. From the seas to the land and the skies, the global species disappearing act has reached a catastrophic and probably unstoppable momentum. Mammals are dying, fish are dying, birds and insects are dying. Imagine a world as quiet as Nevada’s Death Valley in the summer. A world without trees, insects, and birds, where the heat can reach an unbearable 45 degree Celsius. Imagine a silent world of death.
SAVING THE PLANET
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DAVID BROWN—Despite increasingly dire warnings from scientists about the consequences of climate change, the capitalist states—riven by national conflicts and each subordinate to the profits of giant corporations—have been incapable of taking any serious measures to do anything about it.
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PATRICK WALKER—With Noam Chomsky, I feel that whatever comparatively insignificant interference Russia may or may not have plotted against our election, it pales in comparison with the nuclear war risk and wasteful spending of a New Cold War. Especially when unprecedented government and private spending—and equally unprecedented international good will—are essential to addressing humanity’s climate emergency.
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Other senior scientists agree the link is clear. Serious climate change is “unfolding before our eyes”, said Prof Rowan Sutton, at the University of Reading. “No one should be in the slightest surprised that we are seeing very serious heatwaves and associated impacts in many parts of the world.”
It is not too late to make the significant cuts needed in greenhouse gas emissions, said Mann, because the impacts progressively worsen as global warming increases. “It is not going off a cliff, it is like walking out into a minefield,” he said. -
DAVID MATTSON—Rapid increases in concentrations of CO2 and methane triggered most of the near sterilizations of Earth that occurred during the last 500-million years. Alarmingly, our current discharge of CO2 into the atmosphere is more breakneck than during any previous mass extinction. The implications are stark, and not just for grizzly bears. We need to act now. And our first order of business will necessarily be overthrowing the elites and their conservative regime that currently strangles all aspects of our national life.