More GRITtv

The flooding in Pakistan has displaced 2 million people, killed at least 1600 and affected 14 million.  It should be affecting all of us. A disaster of global proportions, requiring a global response, as Gwynne Dyer noted on our show not long ago, it offers a hint of what we can expect if climate change continues on apace. While it's not a cause and effect equation, if we want to know what rising waters look like? Look at Pakistan.

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"Ninety five percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking... there is no scientific dispute about that"


Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England. Duration: 19:22)

James Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey were featured in a one-hour documentary on NOVA/PBS on March 24, 2009. The film follow[ed] James as he photographs spectacular landscapes in Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland and, with his team, collects images from his time-lapse cameras.

A huge chunk of ice has broken off a glacier bordering Greenland in what scientists are calling the biggest event in the Arctic in nearly half a century.

The chunk is now headed for the Nares Strait, the shipping waterway between Greenland and Canada, where it could fuse to nearby land.

While thousands of icebergs calve off Greenland's glaciers annually, the rare size of this one has left scientists scrambling to understand the implications.

Al Jazeera's Charlie Angela reports.

"Climate Change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century."

On May 16, 2009 a collaboration between the British medical journal The Lancet and University College London released the first UCL Lancet Commission report, assessing the impact of global warming on global health, and on populations.

Titled Managing the health effects of climate change (.PDF), the year long study highlights the threat of climate change on patterns of disease, water and food insecurity, human settlements, extreme climatic events, and population migration. The report also highlights the action required by global society to mitigate the health impacts of climate change.

"Climate change," the report concludes, "is the biggest global health threat of the 21 century."

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She sat rocking her baby in her arms, looking out the window at the rain, hoping that its ferocity would drown out the scream rising within her. The scream was the kind you feel when you realize that you may have made a huge, irreversible mistake. With someone else's life. The kind of rising scream you try to shove back down to the depths of your unconscious with denial.

But denial didn't seem to be working anymore.

It never used to rain like this. She had just watched Russia burning on the news. And Pakistan under water. A huge iceberg calve. Floods around the world. Food stocks and crops of all kinds being destroyed. Followed by the news that not only would the US not pass a climate bill, and that the latest round of international climate talks seemed to be going badly.

She rocked her baby harder and faster.

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These are three of the cheerful passages in the article. If you've never read the whole thing I'd recommend it...

The Delusion Revolution:
We're on the Road to Extinction and in Denial
By Robert Jensen

Imagine that you are riding comfortably on a sleek train. You look out the window and see that not too far ahead the tracks end abruptly and that the train will derail if it continues moving ahead. You suggest that the train stop immediately and that the passengers go forward on foot. This will require a major shift in everyone's way of traveling, of course, but it appears to you to be the only realistic option; to continue barreling forward is to court catastrophic consequences. But when you propose this course of action, others who have grown comfortable riding on the train say, "Well, we like the train, and arguing that we should get off is not realistic."

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In the nineteen sixties and seventies the western world was in the throes of a cultural and psychological revolution of awareness that at times threatened to bring down the governments and destroy the societies of some of the most powerful countries on earth, and terrified many who were unable to step outside of the structure and limitations of the worldviews they had constructed for themselves in the course of their lives.

Questioning cultural norms and prejudices and searching for alternatives that better respected and valued human beings and their relationship with the larger society and with the natural world as the basis and reason for societies actions and existence rather than society and the state and the status quo as the determining factors of how people should interact with each other, were the drivers behind this revolution.

The insecurity of many in the face of insistent and deep questioning that in a religious context would have been labeled blasphemy and heresy caused knee-jerk fear reactions that in many arenas turned into violent confrontations, particularly but not only race riots and countless smaller horrors of the racial Civil Rights Movement, and in the struggle for equality under law and social systems of  more than half the population in the Gay and the Women's Liberation Movements, and what was often termed a Sexual Revolution, all of which had been percolating and growing for many years and all of which naturally contributed to making up the more encompassing psychological or awareness heightening Cultural Revolution of the times.

Noted philosopher Alan Watts in the nineteen sixties in "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" described our situation, our human condition, this way:

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Global Analysis
March 2010
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
National Climatic Data Center

1. The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for March 2010 was the warmest on record at 13.5°C (56.3°F), which is 0.77°C (1.39°F) above the 20th century average of 12.7°C (54.9°F).
   
   This was also the 34th consecutive March with global land and ocean temperatures above the 20th century average.


2. The March worldwide land surface temperature was 1.36°C (2.45°F) above the 20th century average of 5.0°C (40.8°F) — the fourth warmest on record.


3. The worldwide ocean surface temperature was 0.56°C (1.01°F) above the 20th century average of 15.9°C (60.7°F) and the warmest March on record.


4. For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 13.0°C (55.3°F) was the fourth warmest January-March period. This value is 0.66°C (1.19°F) above the 20th century average.

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It is understandable why in Propaganda 1 Nazi obfuscation master in residence Joseph Goebbels stressed repetition.

The idea is you keep repeating the same basic points you want to cement into the minds of the controllable, in this case the Limbaugh-Palin-Tea Bag-Fox News solidly committed zealots.

Go back a few years ago and you saw the same argument being raised regarding nuclear power that has been shifted now to global warming. Rush Limbaugh, who is screaming “Fraud!” repeatedly on global warming used the same vocal energy in the area of nuclear power.

Talk of meltdowns and any harm that might be visited upon us involved nothing more than fraudulent propaganda.

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As Rush Limbaugh continues sallying forth and the ardent Tea Baggers make noise, the key to the whole approach, in the manner of propagandists, as evidenced by the Joseph Goebbels technique, is that there is no accountability.

Toss accountability out of the mix and you have a propagandist’s dream. Say anything you want and when demands are made to verify you either switch to another topic or just yell a little louder and make your accusations more vehemently.

Limbaugh, with or without a fix of Oxycontin, generally uses the latter approach. He persists with his fervent accusations and name calling, never bothering to respond to those challenging him.

Notice what happened when he dared attempt a studio audience approach. One of the hottest You Tube selections was of Limbaugh being shouted down by Act Up members who ultimately called him a liar.

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