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===== Catastrophes ===== | ===== Catastrophes ===== | ||
- | === Subtopics === | ||
- | == Climate Crisis == | ||
- | |||
- | Fred-//Jamail_ExistentialThreat.pdf// Dahr Jamail | Climate Disruption Could Pose "Existential Threat" by 2050 | ||
- | Detailed documentary summary of all the impending disasters as of Oct. 2017 (5 pages). | ||
- | WikiPaper: //RG-CataWikiTHEN// | ||
- | |||
- | FRED - **Fleming_Fixing the Sky.docx** - Fleming, //Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control// (book excerpts - 2 pp.) - "For several centuries now, planners, politicians, scientists, and soldiers have proposed schemes for the purposeful manipulation of weather and climate, usually for commercial or military purposes. Their stories have tragic, comedic, and heroic aspects. Control of weather and climate is a perennial issue rooted in hubris and tragedy; it is a pathological issue, illustrating what can go wrong in science; and it is a pressing public policy issue with widespread social implications." | ||
- | |||
- | RG- www.truth-out.org/news/item/42309-our-summer-of-fire-and-the-fires-to-come | ||
- | “The smoke and fires this summer were a wake-up call about how quickly things can change in the natural environment and how large the stakes are. But is this devastating summer just the beginning of much worse things to come? And if this is the harbinger of the future, what will this mean for the health of humans and ecosystems?” | ||
- | |||
- | == Food Crisis == | ||
- | |||
- | Hunziker_EcologicalCollapse.docx | ||
- | A recent landmark study that investigated alarming loss of insects is leaving scientists dumbfounded, deeply troubled, potentially the biggest-ever existential threat, risking ecosystem collapse too soon for comfort. In contrast to global warming, this may be much more imminently dangerous across-the-board to terrestrial life. An enormous loss of insect population, almost decimation in some parts of the world, threatens the life-giving structure of the ecosystem. This is a deadly serious problem! | ||
- | |||
- | RG- THE FOOD CRISIS - based on Holt-Gimenez-Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty.pdf Abstract: "The current global food crisis—decades in the making—is a crushing indictment against capitalist agriculture and the corporate monopolies that dominate the world’s food systems. The role of the industrial agrifood complex in creating the crisis (through the monopolization of input industries, industrial farming, processing, and retailing) and the self-serving neoliberal solutions proposed by the world’s multilateral institutions and leading industrial countries are being met with skepticism, disillusion, and indifference by a general public more concerned with the global economic downturn than with the food crisis. Neoliberal retrenchment has met growing resistance by those most affected by the crisis—the world’s smallholder farmers." | ||
- | |||
- | FRED - **Moore-Food and Negative Value.docx** - Jason W. Moore, //Capitalism in the Web of Life//, excerpts from ch. 10 - “RoundUp Ready crops are not protecting yield so well, either. “Superweeds,” especially but not only in GMO soy, have evolved to survive the onslaught of the famed herbicide. 161 These superweeds stand in for a much more radical shift—the transition from surplus value to negative-value—that we explore in the next section. What became clear, by the late 2000s, was that the agro-biotech expansion was actively limiting the space for a new agricultural revolution. The superweeds’ dramatic, if still-regional, negative impact on labor productivity points towards a broader set of forces undermining neoliberalism’s Cheap Food regime.” | ||
- | |||
- | Monsanto Weed Killer Divides Farmers.pdf | ||
- | |||
- | FRED - **Seymour_Oceans of Acid.docx** - Richard Seymour, "Oceans of Acid" - "Ocean acidification has been established in study after study, with serious and wide-ranging consequences. Here, for the perplexed, or anyone who would simply wants to begin their seasonal depression a little early this year, is what is happening. | ||
- | We release about 38.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. A quarter of that is dissolved into the oceans, thus dampening capitalogenic climate change. But the chemical reactions that produces are lethal for marine life. This life, as it happens, produces most of the oxygen that we breathe. It was oceanic cells that oxidised the atmosphere in the first place. And it is responsible for at least half of all 'primary production' on the planet -- that is, the synthesis of organic compounds using energy from the sun." | ||
- | |||
- | FRED - **NYTimes-OliveOil.docx** - How Climate Change Is Playing Havoc With Olive Oil (and Farmers) - “Gone are the days when you could count on the mild “mezze stagioni,” or half-seasons, that olives rely on before and after the heat. Gone, too, is the cycle you could count on: one year good, next year not good. Harvests have been bad three of the last five years, subject to what Vito Martielli, an analyst with Rabobank, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, called weather-related “shocks.” And with growing demand, wholesale prices have gone up. No one will go hungry if there’s not enough olive oil on the market. But the impact of climate change on such a hardy and high-end product is a measure of how global warming is beginning to challenge how we grow food.“ | ||
- | |||
- | == Nuclear Threats == | ||
- | |||
- | BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS - The lowest point for the Doomsday Clock was 1953, when the clock was set to 2 minutes until midnight after the U.S. and the Soviet Union began testing hydrogen bombs. In the years after, the clock’s time has fluctuated from 17 minutes in 1991 to 3 minutes in 2016.[14] Rise of nationalism, United States President Donald Trump's comments over nuclear weapons, the threat of a renewed arms race between the U.S. and Russia, and the expressed disbelief in the scientific consensus over climate change by the Trump Administration.[5][22][23][24][25] This is the first use of a fraction in the time, and the Clock's closest approach to midnight since 1953. | ||
- | |||
- | Wikipedia - Health in Belarus and Ukraine has shown disturbing trends following the Chernobyl disaster. In Belarus, incidence of congenital defects had risen by 40% within six years of the accident, to the point that it became the principal cause of infant mortality.[159]:52[unreliable medical source?] There was a substantial increase in digestive, circulatory, nervous, respiratory and endocrine diseases and cancers, correlated with areas of high radioactive contamination, and in one especially contaminated district of Belarus, 95% of children were in 2005 reported to have at least one chronic illness.[157]:129, 199[better source needed] The Ukrainian Ministry of Health estimated in 1993 that roughly 70% of its population were unwell, with large increases in respiratory, blood and nervous system diseases.[115]:27[unreliable medical source?] By the year 2000, the number of Ukrainians claiming to be radiation 'sufferers' (poterpili) and receiving state benefits had jumped to 3.5 million, or 5% of the population. Many of these are populations resettled from contaminated zones, or former or current Chernobyl plant workers...Poor or inaccessible statistics has meant that causal connections are very difficult to make in both Belarus and Ukraine. It has been observed that Belarus in particular actively suppresses or ignores health-related research...Under Soviet rule, the extent of radiation injury was systematically covered up.[citation needed] Most cases of acute radiation sickness (ARS) were disguised as ‘Vegetovascular dystonia’ (VvD), a Soviet classification for a type of panic disorder with possible symptoms including heart palpitations, sweating, tremors, nausea, hypotension or hypertension, neurosis, spasms and seizures: symptoms which resemble the neurological effects of ARS. | ||
- | |||
- | (weapons and powerplants) | ||
- | wikipedia - "On 5 July 2012, the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) found that the causes of the accident had been foreseeable, and that the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), had failed to meet basic safety requirements such as risk assessment, preparing for containing collateral damage, and developing evacuation plans. On 12 October 2012, TEPCO admitted for the first time that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants....In 2014 Japan enacted the State Secrecy Law. The Fukushima incident falls under this law and, as a "state secret", independent investigations and reports are forbidden by law. | ||
- | |||
- | == pandemics == | ||
==== NARRATIVES ==== | ==== NARRATIVES ==== | ||
Line 107: | Line 69: | ||
There was no better place to bear witness to these contradictions and shifts than New York City... How New York City attempted to mitigate and adapt to climate change—and also to respond to climate justice more broadly – set key precedents nationally and internationally. | There was no better place to bear witness to these contradictions and shifts than New York City... How New York City attempted to mitigate and adapt to climate change—and also to respond to climate justice more broadly – set key precedents nationally and internationally. | ||
- | === How === | + | === How === |
+ | As Future Historians may recall, in 2017 we collected an excellent library in the Dropbox of articles on impending catastrophes to document our THEN about ecocidal capitalism. Alas, some of the direst predictions of two years ago have been surpassed by reality (following “Greeman’s Curve”). | ||
- | == The Fable of Noah We! == | + | Since multiple major collapses and catastrophes are inevitable, indeed are already happening, we need as future historians to face them squarely, and describe them in the past tense. As historians of 2120, our task is to face the worst; and yet also to come up with possible survival scenarios. Far from discouraging, this would give our readers something to hope for and work for. |
- | by Sam Friedman | + | |
- | Once upon a time, in a land now gone below, clouds gathered, and rains began.These were not your ordinary clouds. They were very ominous indeed. The rai ndrops were the size of golfballs the first few days. But as the days passed, they grew to include baseballs andthen even basketballs.And there were lots and lots of rain-balls.Day after day, it rained. The puddles filled the roads. Roofs leaked, then gushed. In the districts where the poor people lived, roofs collapsed. After a week or so, whole tenement buildings began to fall in. | + | These scenarios fall under the category of HOW, which is the most difficult and important part of our narrative. If planetary emergence does take place in the future, it will be on a planet rapidly collapsing, which will exacerbate the conflict between the eight billion and the eight billionnaires who own half the world’s wealth. This is the point we must develop. |
+ | If there is a 1 in 100 chance for there to be historians in 2120, this emergence must have transpired by around 2030, while there was still a chance for a united humanity to stop pollution and start massive remedial action to mitigate its results. Some “tipping points” may already have been reached. Under such cirumstances, but under the control of a planetary federation of democratic, egalitarian communities and on the advice of the best scientists, some forms of geoengineering would inevitably be considered (starting with planting trees) and might be effective. | ||
- | It got so bad, the politicians forgot all about promising tax cuts, monuments for their pals, and new prisons.The Republicans said that the rains were a sign of God’s displeasure at tax-and-spend government and atmolly-coddling the poor. They called for cutting food stamps from three loaves of bread a month to two; for stronger umbrellas for police on riot duty; and for tax incentives to spur investment in galoshes and reinforced raincoats. Just to show how seriously they took the threat of these rains, they adopted a new emblem for their party: The elephant trunk snorkel as a symbol of self-reliance under all conditions.The Democrats scoffed at the Republicans and their callousness. They demanded a program of levees or the river banks, and of tarpaulins and tacks to fix the leaks on the roofs of the poor. Of course, they also put forward suggestions for tax cuts and monuments for contractors good enough to provide these services and products. They too changed their party emblem, to the donkeys who hauled all that sand. | + | Based the on examples of New Orleans, Occupy Sandy, and other historical and international instances of communities spontaneously organizing effective mutual aid in disaster situations while authorities did nothing or imposed violent repression and mistreatment of victims, we can elaborate our narratives. |
- | After the legislative debates and compromises, Democratic and Republican officials alike hired their cousins and contributors to do the job. When the largest of these companies, End-Run, provided sandbags held together with fishnets, and tarpaulins of chickenwire, they promised a thorough audit by Under-Sand andCompany. They also got lots of photo-ops and posed beside elephants and donkeys who were hard at work.Now, the common people were fed up with their leaky roofs, collapsing buildings, and having to swim to their jobs. By the twelfth day of the rains, they were demanding action. Some went to their churches,mosques, or synagogues, where they all were told to pray to the lord for smaller raindrops and su nny skies;and to sacrifice a scapegoat or two to make their prayers effective. And, of course,to atone for their sins and think of Heaven, a nice, warm, dry spot far above the rainclouds. But after catching and burning a few workers of other faiths, and praying all the while, the rains just kept falling. | + | Below, I have attempted to elaborate the broad outlines of one such a scenario, and I invite everyone to add to it, develop it, put in and elaborate details. You can post them here by editing this page (don’t forget to add your name), add them in the Dropbox, or email them to AnotherWorldNYC@gmail.com. If you're feeling particularly ambitious, try writing your own scenario from scratch and others can contribute to it as well. |
- | Others went to the leftish political parties, the Social Democrats and Greens. These parties organized a demonstration where the party officials swam around the legislature with signs demanding action. (No workers came because they held it during a working day.) The main effort of these parties was to set up re-call petitions to hold new elections. It was real hard work swimming door to door to get signatures, and the ink on these signatures kept running in the rain. But these folks were determined and gutsy. By the 17th day of the rains, they had enough signatures to demand a re-call election. And, after alot of legal hemming and hawing, even the election commission had to agree (on the 25th day). So new elections were called for three months (92 days) later. And so the election campaign began.And the rains kept falling. The Democratic and Republican officials got more and more worried about what the common people might do. They started blaming a neighboring land they called the I-Wreck-Ye’s for the rains. They gathered an army, and supplied it with all the best swords and spears made by the End-Run and Boing-Boing-Blockhead-Marionetta corporations. And the army waded off to defeat the idolatrousI-Wreck-Ye’s to stop the rains. But within three days, the army swam back home again because their weapons were too rusted to use, and because their uniforms (by Oy-Veh!-Say-Low-Rain) were rotting away. TheDemocrats and Republicans thereupon cried that the war was being sabotaged by I-Wreck-Ye-loving red and green terrorists, and called upon all the patriotic citizens to put out flags to support their country. But within two days, these flags (by the Oy-Veh!-Say-Low-Rain and the I’mGod corporations) had molded to ruin. | + | //[Richard scenario here]// |
- | Now, some of the workers in the shipbuilders, seafarers, longshore, umbrella-makers,and trash-haulers unions were getting pretty upset. They were afraid all their families and friends would drown or get crushed by falling tenements. They called a meeting. Many, many good people came, including waist-deep ecologists and women tired of pumping basements when they had swum home from work (because even then, women’s work was never done, from rainfall dawn to pump and run.) They named themselves the Necessary Organization Against Horrors (NOAH, for short).Their action plan was to build mighty ships. The trash-haulers brought lumber and nails from the rubble of collapsed buildings. A lot of the boards and doors were floating in the roads anyway. The sailors brought rope and tar they just happened to find on20the piers. The longshore workers and truckers brought boxes of food and jugs to catch rainwater.(These just happened to get dropped as they swam packages to ships and trucks.) And everybody, women,men, and kids, worked dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn (when not at their jobs) to build ships and put food on them. The waist-deep ecologists swam through the countryside rounding up animals and seeds—snails,pussycats, hyenas, morning glory, cannabis, even a few donkeys and elephants, and lots of doves to seek the land of peace and dryness.And on the 31st day, NOAH and the common people went to their ships singing and praying. | + | See also [[friedman-noah|The Fable of Noah We!]] by Sam Friedman |
- | But the rich and the politicians heard about it because a few over-their-head ecologists, who had decided that the human race had done too much damage and should drown, ratted out NOAH’s plans to the cops.So the politicians and the rich folks and the police came running with their guns to take what the workers had made for their own use. They had lots of practice at such theft, since that is their day job.But this time, their plans to seize the ships for their own use were pretty obvious,so it made it easier for the workers to know what to do. They fought back. When most everybody and everything were on board, they sent a herd of aurochs running down the pier to shove the attackers back.And so NOAH sailed off with great hopes, leaving the rich and the politicians beside the collapsing levees in their designer galoshes and silken raincoats—trying to make life jackets out of bales of End-Run stock. After some weeks on the waters, NOAH and the people and animals and plants landed. They built monuments to the aurochs for giving their all, and to the workers of NOAH for saving all but the aurochs. | ||
=== Now === | === Now === | ||
+ | |||
+ | == Restoring the Earth == | ||
+ | |||
+ | Little by little the natural order was re-establishing itself on earth. In the agricultural countries of the South, the peasants had taken back the good lands expropriated by invaders and used to cultivate luxury products for export to rich countries. These export commodities —coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, bananas, spices – had been produced by the labor of impoverished natives reduced to semi-slavery. Their children had ended up in horrible favelas, bidonvilles, slums and urban projects where they lived on garbage. In the name of “free markets,” rich monopolies had ruined peasant markets by flooding them with produce at the lowest prices. That unfair competition was subsidized by the “democratic” governments that offered gross subsidies to big agro-business enterprises. | ||
+ | |||
+ | In Africa today, there are museums devoted to the 'chocolate children'. Pathetic huts, child drawings, photographs and recorded interviews bear witness to a common early 21st Century practice. It was a memorial of the sufferings of parents too poor to feed their own children who ended up selling them to manpower merchants and never seeing them again. These merchants sold them to cocoa cultivators who starved them while making them work endless hours picking cocoa to fulfill contracts with the multinationals. Companies like Nestlé resold these chocolates to children in industrial countries at prices twenty to a hundred times the cost of production. Interviews revealed that none of these children had ever seen, much less tasted a chocolate bar. | ||
+ | |||
+ | During the planetary Emergence, these poor peasants of Africa, Latin America, and Asia organized and struggled to take back their traditional lands. Their first goal was to become self-sufficient nutritionally by planting traditional subsistence crops. At the same time on part of the land, they continued to farm the sugar, cocoa, coffee, spices and other commodities that city workers like to eat, to use for trade. Women had long provided the labor and commercial savvy for agriculture in Africa, and now their energy and experience was united as they took the initiative long monopolized by male profiteers and armed thugs. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Regular trade or barter was re-established spontaneously from the very beginning of the reconstruction period. Sailors and aircrew who brought emergency relief and the technical aid for things like irrigation and communication, didn’t return home with their planes and boats empty. They filled them with good things for workers of the world’s metropoles. Railroaders, truckers, sailors and aviation crews had played a primordial role by bringing aid. After medication and food came tools with teams of aid-workers and technicians working in cooperation with local assemblies. They helped the peasants dig wells, construct cisterns and irrigate. They helped push back the hunger, thirst, and diarrhoea that had for so long tortured the Billions in the south of the planet. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Thus the natural rapport between city and country was re-established almost spontaneously in outbursts of solidarity, mutual help and cooperation. For the first time in five imperialist centuries, nobody was dying of hunger either in the rich fields of the earth or in the slums of great opulent cities. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Today in 2117 we live on a planet where vast desert lands have been reclaimed through irrigation and the revival of long-dormant native seeds, where new forests have been planted to halt erosion, prevent desertification, and absorb CO2 while releasing oxygen, where animal and vegetable waste matter is recycled as nature fertilizer, where permaculture techniques have replaced chemical fertilizers and pesticides, where small farmers flourish and provide fresh, healthy, seasonal produce to local markets which also serve to unite communities, etc, etc. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Yet all this was not only possible, it was already actually happening in a century ago on a small scale in the interstices of capitalist society, visible elements of the new world growing within the old. | ||
+ | |||
+ | We now look back in horrified amazement at the world of 2017 — a planet of continued enclosures where forest people were exterminated and forests cut down to graze cattle for McDonald's burgers, where peasants were legally deprived of the right to plant their own seeds and forced to buy them from global monopolies like Montsanto, where peasants routinely committed suicide to escape the overwhelming burden of debt, where traditional subsistance farmers in Mexico | ||
+ | were ruined by the dumping of huge amounts of cheap industrially-produced corn into local markets, where vast factory-farms, owned by banks and conglomerates, were making billions transforming inputs of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers and pesticides into mega-tons of uniformly tasteless produce designed to attract the eye and to remain salable for weeks after harvesting, where agricultural products were transported thousands of miles to markets at a huge cost in carbon pollution, where monopolistic distribution chains paid farmers ridiculously low prices for their produce and suck up enormous profits overcharging customers, where nearly half of this excess produce went to waste in the 'advanced' while famines raged across half the world, where food riots out periodically broke out in Asia, and where the extraction of petroleum for industrial agriculture and the clear-cutting of forests for profitable luxury crops like palm oil contributed massively to global warming and impending climate catastrophe. | ||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | === Subtopics === | ||
+ | |||
+ | == Climate Crisis == | ||
+ | |||
+ | Fred-//Jamail_ExistentialThreat.pdf// Dahr Jamail | Climate Disruption Could Pose "Existential Threat" by 2050 | ||
+ | Detailed documentary summary of all the impending disasters as of Oct. 2017 (5 pages). | ||
+ | WikiPaper: //RG-CataWikiTHEN// | ||
+ | |||
+ | FRED - **Fleming_Fixing the Sky.docx** - Fleming, //Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control// (book excerpts - 2 pp.) - "For several centuries now, planners, politicians, scientists, and soldiers have proposed schemes for the purposeful manipulation of weather and climate, usually for commercial or military purposes. Their stories have tragic, comedic, and heroic aspects. Control of weather and climate is a perennial issue rooted in hubris and tragedy; it is a pathological issue, illustrating what can go wrong in science; and it is a pressing public policy issue with widespread social implications." | ||
+ | |||
+ | RG- www.truth-out.org/news/item/42309-our-summer-of-fire-and-the-fires-to-come | ||
+ | “The smoke and fires this summer were a wake-up call about how quickly things can change in the natural environment and how large the stakes are. But is this devastating summer just the beginning of much worse things to come? And if this is the harbinger of the future, what will this mean for the health of humans and ecosystems?” | ||
+ | |||
+ | == Food Crisis == | ||
+ | |||
+ | Hunziker_EcologicalCollapse.docx | ||
+ | A recent landmark study that investigated alarming loss of insects is leaving scientists dumbfounded, deeply troubled, potentially the biggest-ever existential threat, risking ecosystem collapse too soon for comfort. In contrast to global warming, this may be much more imminently dangerous across-the-board to terrestrial life. An enormous loss of insect population, almost decimation in some parts of the world, threatens the life-giving structure of the ecosystem. This is a deadly serious problem! | ||
+ | |||
+ | RG- THE FOOD CRISIS - based on Holt-Gimenez-Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty.pdf Abstract: "The current global food crisis—decades in the making—is a crushing indictment against capitalist agriculture and the corporate monopolies that dominate the world’s food systems. The role of the industrial agrifood complex in creating the crisis (through the monopolization of input industries, industrial farming, processing, and retailing) and the self-serving neoliberal solutions proposed by the world’s multilateral institutions and leading industrial countries are being met with skepticism, disillusion, and indifference by a general public more concerned with the global economic downturn than with the food crisis. Neoliberal retrenchment has met growing resistance by those most affected by the crisis—the world’s smallholder farmers." | ||
+ | |||
+ | FRED - **Moore-Food and Negative Value.docx** - Jason W. Moore, //Capitalism in the Web of Life//, excerpts from ch. 10 - “RoundUp Ready crops are not protecting yield so well, either. “Superweeds,” especially but not only in GMO soy, have evolved to survive the onslaught of the famed herbicide. 161 These superweeds stand in for a much more radical shift—the transition from surplus value to negative-value—that we explore in the next section. What became clear, by the late 2000s, was that the agro-biotech expansion was actively limiting the space for a new agricultural revolution. The superweeds’ dramatic, if still-regional, negative impact on labor productivity points towards a broader set of forces undermining neoliberalism’s Cheap Food regime.” | ||
+ | |||
+ | Monsanto Weed Killer Divides Farmers.pdf | ||
+ | |||
+ | FRED - **Seymour_Oceans of Acid.docx** - Richard Seymour, "Oceans of Acid" - "Ocean acidification has been established in study after study, with serious and wide-ranging consequences. Here, for the perplexed, or anyone who would simply wants to begin their seasonal depression a little early this year, is what is happening. | ||
+ | We release about 38.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. A quarter of that is dissolved into the oceans, thus dampening capitalogenic climate change. But the chemical reactions that produces are lethal for marine life. This life, as it happens, produces most of the oxygen that we breathe. It was oceanic cells that oxidised the atmosphere in the first place. And it is responsible for at least half of all 'primary production' on the planet -- that is, the synthesis of organic compounds using energy from the sun." | ||
+ | |||
+ | FRED - **NYTimes-OliveOil.docx** - How Climate Change Is Playing Havoc With Olive Oil (and Farmers) - “Gone are the days when you could count on the mild “mezze stagioni,” or half-seasons, that olives rely on before and after the heat. Gone, too, is the cycle you could count on: one year good, next year not good. Harvests have been bad three of the last five years, subject to what Vito Martielli, an analyst with Rabobank, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, called weather-related “shocks.” And with growing demand, wholesale prices have gone up. No one will go hungry if there’s not enough olive oil on the market. But the impact of climate change on such a hardy and high-end product is a measure of how global warming is beginning to challenge how we grow food.“ | ||
+ | |||
+ | == Nuclear Threats == | ||
+ | |||
+ | BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS - The lowest point for the Doomsday Clock was 1953, when the clock was set to 2 minutes until midnight after the U.S. and the Soviet Union began testing hydrogen bombs. In the years after, the clock’s time has fluctuated from 17 minutes in 1991 to 3 minutes in 2016.[14] Rise of nationalism, United States President Donald Trump's comments over nuclear weapons, the threat of a renewed arms race between the U.S. and Russia, and the expressed disbelief in the scientific consensus over climate change by the Trump Administration.[5][22][23][24][25] This is the first use of a fraction in the time, and the Clock's closest approach to midnight since 1953. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Wikipedia - Health in Belarus and Ukraine has shown disturbing trends following the Chernobyl disaster. In Belarus, incidence of congenital defects had risen by 40% within six years of the accident, to the point that it became the principal cause of infant mortality.[159]:52[unreliable medical source?] There was a substantial increase in digestive, circulatory, nervous, respiratory and endocrine diseases and cancers, correlated with areas of high radioactive contamination, and in one especially contaminated district of Belarus, 95% of children were in 2005 reported to have at least one chronic illness.[157]:129, 199[better source needed] The Ukrainian Ministry of Health estimated in 1993 that roughly 70% of its population were unwell, with large increases in respiratory, blood and nervous system diseases.[115]:27[unreliable medical source?] By the year 2000, the number of Ukrainians claiming to be radiation 'sufferers' (poterpili) and receiving state benefits had jumped to 3.5 million, or 5% of the population. Many of these are populations resettled from contaminated zones, or former or current Chernobyl plant workers...Poor or inaccessible statistics has meant that causal connections are very difficult to make in both Belarus and Ukraine. It has been observed that Belarus in particular actively suppresses or ignores health-related research...Under Soviet rule, the extent of radiation injury was systematically covered up.[citation needed] Most cases of acute radiation sickness (ARS) were disguised as ‘Vegetovascular dystonia’ (VvD), a Soviet classification for a type of panic disorder with possible symptoms including heart palpitations, sweating, tremors, nausea, hypotension or hypertension, neurosis, spasms and seizures: symptoms which resemble the neurological effects of ARS. | ||
+ | |||
+ | (weapons and powerplants) | ||
+ | wikipedia - "On 5 July 2012, the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) found that the causes of the accident had been foreseeable, and that the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), had failed to meet basic safety requirements such as risk assessment, preparing for containing collateral damage, and developing evacuation plans. On 12 October 2012, TEPCO admitted for the first time that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants....In 2014 Japan enacted the State Secrecy Law. The Fukushima incident falls under this law and, as a "state secret", independent investigations and reports are forbidden by law. | ||
+ | |||
+ | == pandemics == | ||
+ | |||
+ | tbd |