Last week, climate scientists warned that:
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will shatter the symbolic barrier of 400 parts per million (ppm) this year and will not fall below it in our lifetimes.
Adding to the sense of urgency, NASA reported that last month was the hottest May on record since 1880. Since October 2015, every month has been globally the hottest ever measured. Meanwhile, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US say that ‘future summers could regularly be hotter than the hottest on record’.
Dangerous climate change is not something for the future; it is happening now. Recent climate records have not just been broken but ‘obliterated’, provoking ‘a stunned reaction from climate scientists’. One scientist said:
The numbers are completely unprecedented. They really stick out like a sore thumb.
As Noam Chomsky wrote in a sobering new article on humanity’s prospects for survival:
Hardly a day passes without new evidence of how severe the crisis is.
But the required radical and urgent solutions to the crisis will never be found in the ‘mainstream’ media, owned and operated by the same corporate and state forces that have driven us to the brink of disaster.
In the US, the next presidential election will be contested by two rich establishment candidates, each of whom would be a disaster for climate stability, global peace and social justice. Here in the UK, establishment elites and their media accomplices are…