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Extreme weather

Climate Change Causes Torrential Flooding In Pakistan

August 29, 2022 Molly Rosenzweig, Left Voice. , , ,
Devastating floods are occurring across Pakistan due to monsoon rains. Since June, more than 1,000 people have been killed by floods, with thousands more being displaced and having to go without food. Capitalism makes these disasters the new normal, with workers, particularly those of the Global South, bearing the brunt. Just this weekend, tens of thousands of people have had to flee their homes in Northern Pakistan due to floods. There are many more that still need to be rescued. More than 33 million people have been affected over the past few weeks, millions of homes have been destroyed, and infrastructure such as roads and bridges have been damaged or destroyed along with millions of acres of farmland. This is not merely just one or a few bad storms.

One Out Of Seven Persons Affected By Floods; Pakistan Declares Emergency

August 28, 2022 Bharat Dogra, Popular Resistance. , , ,
30 to 33 million persons are reported to be seriously affected by floods in Pakistan, a country with a population of 220 million. Due to this a national emergency has been declared in Pakistan. The previous worst floods in Pakistan were recorded in 2010 when nearly 20 million people were affected, causing damages estimated at $10 billion. This was followed by a very serious flood situation next year in Sindh. What is more, there was some serious flood event or the other for the next five years. This year Sindh and Balochistan are reported to be the worst affected, although serious harm has been reported from elsewhere too. From mid-June to the last week of August, nearly 1000 persons have perished in floods and a higher number have faced injuries.

High-Profile Paper On ‘Catastrophic’ Climate Impacts

August 11, 2022 David Spratt, Resilience. , , ,
So what does this new paper say?  Well, in essence, some very similar things to our report What Lies Beneath: The underestimation of existential climate risks, written with my Breakthrough colleague Ian Dunlop. When that report was first published in 2017, and then expanded in 2018 with a foreword by Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, it had a significant impact, especially in Europe, with German and Slovenian translations, and a front-cover interview with the German energy magazine, Energiewende Magazin (translation here). It was a key document in the successful campaign to have the Club of Rome adopt a climate emergency position, and its subsequent advocacy which morphed into its Planetary Emergency campaign. 

The Dawn Of The Apocalypse

July 26, 2022 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
The past week has seen record-breaking heat waves across Europe. Wildfires have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest day on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In China, more than a dozen cities issued the “highest possible heat warning” this weekend with over 900 million people in China enduring a scorching heat wave along with severe flooding and landslides across large swathes of southern China. Dozens of people have died. Millions of Chinese have been displaced. Economic losses run into the billions of yuan. Droughts, which have destroyed crops, killed livestock and forced many to flee their homes, are creating a potential famine in the Horn of Africa.

Extinction Rebellion Break Glass At News UK On Hottest Day On Record

July 19, 2022 Extinction Rebellion. , , ,
At 6:30am this morning, 2 people from Extinction Rebellion carefully cracked 2 windows at the entrance of the News UK building at London Bridge. At the same time, 4 others – including a scientist – chalk sprayed “TELL THE TRUTH” and “40 DEGREES = DEATH” on the front of the building, and pasted recent copies of The Sun headlines about the heatwave onto windows. Special care was taken to ensure no one was hurt when the windows were cracked. The action comes just two days after six healthcare professionals, including two GPs, were arrested for breaking windows at JP Morgan’s Canary Wharf HQ. This act of nonviolent civil disobedience comes as a response to the media’s coverage of the current heatwave. On Saturday, the British Government declared the nation’s first ever level 4 national emergency heat red alert.

We Need To Stop Pretending We Can Limit Global Warming To 1.5°C

July 11, 2022 James Dyke, Byline Times. , , ,
We are not going to limit global warming to 1.5°C. This means we will soon be entering a much warmer and more dangerous world. The threshold of 1.5°C was the highest ambition of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement. It was arrived at by a realisation that warming beyond this temperature would produce intolerable suffering to those most exposed to global warming. So what can we make of politicians who continue to argue that ‘1.5°C is still alive’? Are they misinformed or are they simply lying?

In The Centre Of Global Warming

June 5, 2022 Bharat Dogra, Popular Resistance. , , ,
May 15 this year came as a timely warning that India is in the center of the global warming crisis. On this day the maximum temperature crossed the 47 degrees Celsius limit in about 20 cities, mostly in northwest and central parts of the country. These cities also figured in the table of the hottest cities at world level on this day. Most of these cities and the surrounding countryside have been figuring prominently also in the longer heat waves which have been experienced since early April. Six of these cities are located in the Thar desert or the area close to it. These include Jaisalmer, Phalodi, Pilani, Churu, Bikaner and Ganganagar. Four other cities are concentrated in a region of 13 districts known as Bundelkhand in Central India which saw temperature reaching 49 degrees C in Banda.

Grim 2022 Drought Outlook For Western US

May 22, 2022 Imtiaz Rangwala, Consortium News. , , ,
Much of the western U.S. has been in the grip of an unrelenting drought since early 2020. The dryness has coincided with record-breaking wildfires, intense and long-lasting heat waves, low stream flows and dwindling water supplies in reservoirs that millions of people across the region rely on. Heading into summer, the outlook is pretty grim. The National Weather Service’s latest seasonal outlook, issued May 19, 2022, described drought persisting across most of the West and parts of the Great Plains. One driver of the Western drought has been persistent La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific since the summer of 2020. During La Niña, cooler tropical Pacific waters help nudge the jet stream northward.

Politicians Continue To Fail On Climate; We Must Fight For A Livable Future

May 9, 2022 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its sixth report in three phases beginning in August, 2021 and concluding in April 2022. The first report declared that the climate crisis is unquestionably due to human activity and called the situation a 'Code Red for Humanity.' The second and third parts indicated that not enough action is being taken not just to mitigate the crisis but also to adapt to it. Clearing the FOG speaks with Professor Benjamin Horton of the Earth Observatory of Singapore about the gravity of the crisis, including that some impacts such as sea level rise are irreversible for the foreseeable future, the importance of activism by scientists to inform the public and push policy makers and how to keep fighting for a more livable future.

South African KwaZulu-Natal Province Imperiled By Flooding

April 28, 2022 Abayomi Azikiwe, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Another climate disaster in the Southern Africa region has taken place over the last two weeks in the KwaZulu-Natal Province (KZN), where the important port city of Durban is located. Official reports from the South African government says that several hundred people have been killed due to the flooding while tens of thousands of others have been dislocated and in drastic need of humanitarian assistance. The government of President Cyril Ramaphosa and the parliament has declared a state of disaster in response to the flooding. The South African National Defense Forces (SANDF) has announced that it is deploying up to 10,000 troops to assist in the relief and rescue operations. These floods come in the aftermath of a series of other weather events which have been attributed to climate change.

Climate Change Impacting Southern Africa From Malawi To Madagascar

March 23, 2022 Abayomi Azikwe, Popular Resistance. , , ,
In Southern Africa, a series of cyclones and tropical storms have done enormous damage in Mozambique, Madagascar and Malawi. The most recent Cyclone Gombe resulted in the displacement of thousands of people in Mozambique and Malawi. An earlier Tropical Storm Ana struck Madagascar along with Mozambique and Malawi. Cyclone Gombe reached the coast of Mossuril district in Nampula Province in Mozambique on March 11. The severe tropical event was marked by winds as high as 190km/h (118 miles) with rainfall at 200/24h (7.874 inches). Gombe came just two months after Ana which struck Mozambique in January. In addition to this there was Tropical Depression Dumako which landed in February. Just in Mozambique, 200,000 people were impacted in Nampula, Zambezia and Tete provinces.

After Amazon Tragedy, Workers Demand Safe Working Conditions

February 7, 2022 Rebekah Entralgo, Inequality.org. , , ,
The fight for justice and accountability continues for six Amazon employees who were killed when a warehouse roof collapsed during a tornado in December. Federal officials are investigating possible health and safety violations at the facility in Edwardsville, Illinois, a suburb of St. Louis. Illinois lawmakers are considering raising statewide standards for warehouse construction to prevent future tragedies. And family members of one of the employees, Austin McEwen, recently filed a wrongful death suit against the giant retailer. “My daughter was not expendable,” said Jeffrey Hebb at a January rally in front of the Edwardsville facility. Hebb’s daughter, 34-year-old Etheria Hebb, died in the warehouse collapse, leaving behind a one-year-old daughter.

Capitalism Contributed To Factory Workers Deaths

December 24, 2021 Richard S. Dunn, Covert Action Magazine. , , ,
The weekend of December 10-11, 2021, saw a reported 30 tornadoes hitting several states from Arkansas to Illinois; as of this writing, 74 people are confirmed dead and several buildings severely damaged or totally demolished. All the cases of death and destruction are devastating; however, the most telling and unconscionable are the deaths of eight people at a candle-making factory in Mayfield, Kentucky, and six in an Amazon facility in Edwardsville, Illinois. What makes these two cases significant is that they most likely could have been avoided, but once again capitalism’s insatiable greed is significantly responsible for these people’s death. The trade union is the most effective tool the working class has in confronting and challenging capitalism in its attack on workers’ rights and quality of life.

Labor Activists Want To Know Why Workers Were Left To Die

December 16, 2021 Jeff Schuhrke , In These Times. , , ,
In the aftermath of a rare string of December tornadoes last Friday night that left 80 people dead across six states, labor activists are questioning why employees at two large worksites in the path of destruction were left exposed to danger. A candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky was totally destroyed after sustaining a direct tornado hit with 110 workers inside. At least eight people died and dozens more were severely injured. At the same time, an Amazon delivery station in Edwardsville, Illinois was also hit by a tornado during a shift change, causing the roof to fly off and part of an exterior wall to collapse, killing six workers ranging in age from 26 to 62. As search-and-rescue teams sifted through the rubble the next morning, Amazon founder and world’s second-richest person Jeff Bezos was celebrating another successful rocket launch by his private spaceflight company Blue Origin.

Amazon Under Fire After Warehouse Collapse Kills At Least Six People

December 14, 2021 Andrea Germanos, Commondreams. , , ,
Amazon was accused Saturday of putting corporate profits above worker safety following the tornado-caused partial collapse of a St. Louis-area warehouse that left at least six people dead. “Time and time again Amazon puts its bottom line above the lives of its employees,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), in a statement. “Requiring workers to work through such a major tornado warning event as this was inexcusable.” Appelbaum’s remarks came after an outbreak of over 20 devastating tornadoes late Friday tore through multiple states and killed dozens of people. In addition to Illinois, affected states included Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.
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