Imperiled Life. Javier Sethness
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forty years ago, and Lake Tanganyika was observed in mid-2010 to have higher temperatures than at any other time in the past fifteen hundred years and is warming at an unprecedented rate.[56] The world’s oceans are 30 percent more acidic now than a century ago.[57] Glaciers across the globe are in steady retreat, with 75 percent of the Himalayan glaciers now classified this way according to a March 2011 study.[58] Temperatures observed in Tibet in 2010 reached highs not previously seen in the past five decades of record keeping.[59] Peru’s glaciers have lost 22 percent of their surface area over the past few decades.[60]
Oxfam reports that flooding and extreme storm disaster events have tripled in impoverished southern societies since the 1980s.[61] As Edward S. Herman and David Peterson note, the genocidal conflict in Darfur may have found some of its basis in the climate change that has already occurred.[62] A recent Columbia University study found that historical conflict in southern societies were twice as likely in years with an active El Niño Southern Oscillation, which in drastically decreasing rainfall patterns over much of the tropics—Africa, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia—simulate the conditions that further climate destabilization can be expected to bring about.[63] Mike Davis’s findings that the historical synergy between late nineteenth-century El Niño events and the onset of capitalist colonialism in India, China, and much of Africa produced the worst famines recorded in human history—ones that killed between 30 and 60 million people—take on new meaning in light of today’s climate change.[64]
To date, then, climate change has proven disastrous, yet the threats posed by climate destabilization will likely be far more severe in the near future. The following examines some of the climatological findings regarding our downward spiral toward climate catastrophe—an eventuality that is promised without a rational and revolutionary intervention to check it.
In its 2007 Fourth Annual Report, the IPCC offers its worst-case scenario of a 6.4ºC (11.2°F) increase in average temperatures by the end of the twenty-first century as being based on the lack of any sort of sensible mitigating policies and the reproduction of fossil-fuel-intensive capitalist growth. The report states that a 2ºC (3.6ºF) increase in average temperatures is associated with an atmospheric carbon concentration of about 500 ppm, a 3ºC (5.25ºF) rise with 600 ppm, and a 5ºC–6ºC (8.75–11.2ºF) increase with 900–1,000 ppm.[65] As has already been noted, humanity presently finds itself tied to a trajectory that would see the realization of this 6ºC increase by the century’s end. The UK Met Office maintains that a 4ºC (7ºF) increase by the year 2060 is entirely possible. Anderson’s predictions for life in a world warmer by 4ºC, mentioned above, is relevant here, as is Hansen and his colleagues’ determination that the current warming rate is progressing between ten and a thousand times more rapidly than the nearly terminal extinction rate at the end of the end of the Permian era.[66]
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