Spain Faces the First Heat Wave of the Summer

#Spain suffers the first #heat_wave of the #summer, with maximum temperatures above 40ºC, according to the forecast of the State Meteorological Agency (AEMET).

The AEMET has decreed alert in several regions, including the provinces of #Cadiz, #Córdoba, #Seville, #Jaen, #Ciudad Real, #Toledo, #Badajoz, and# Madrid, which will be on orange alert, as will Gran Canaria, in the province of #LasPalmas, along with #Lanzarote and #Fuerteventura.

The agency warns that, with an orange alert, there is a significant risk of unusual $weather phenomena and a certain degree of danger to people.

The heat wave began on Sunday and is expected to continue throughout the week. According to the AEMET, on Monday temperatures exceeded 38 ºC in #Madrid and reached 44.4 ºC in the #Andalusian town of El Granado, in the province of #Huelva (southwest).

#WeDontHaveTime #Politics #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency #TomorrowIsTooLate #GlobalWarming #Environment
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Spain-Faces-the-First-Heat-Wave-of-the-Summer-20230627-0021.html

Blocking roads isn’t crazy – It’s our last hope that sanity will prevail

Jonathan Cook (Middle East Eye)

A lack of public concern in the West at dealing with the impending climate catastrophe isn’t accidental. It’s been engineered.

COP27, the United Nations’ annual climate conference attended by world leaders, kicked off in Egypt at the weekend in the midst of a wave of civil disobedience actions in the UK.

The protests have been led by environmental groups such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, and come as oil giants have announced massive profits from surging energy prices caused by the Ukraine war, and new reports show catastrophic climate change is soon to reach a tipping point, becoming irreversible. (...)

(Text continues below the photo.)

Protesters, with their necks padlocked together, block the road as they take part in a protest by Just Stop Oil climate activists at Piccadilly Circus, London, on 9 October 2022 (AFP)

Most of these actions have been ignored by the media or dismissed as the antisocial posturings of individuals divorced from the concerns of ordinary people. (...)

But the criticism most widely hurled at these various forms of direct action is that they are counterproductive, that they antagonise ordinary people and make them stop listening.

There is an obvious rejoinder. No one appeared to be listening before the activists took to the streets. Endless scientific warnings have made little impact on public discourse. The establishment media have paid only lip service to the dangers, even as the effects on the climate have become harder to overlook. And governments have made placatory noises while doing nothing meaningful to reverse the collision course humanity is on with the planet. (...)

The World Meteorological Organization, meanwhile, noted that the three greenhouse gases have reached record highs, with methane – the biggest offender – showing the largest year-on-year jump.

Civil disobedience is a symptom not of the climate crisis – nature won’t listen to the protesters – but of the inaction that continues to be the default position of governing political elites, as well as the billionaire-owned media that is supposed to serve as a watchdog on their power. (...)

The establishment media is playing a crucial part in twisting social and political priorities. Every time it focuses on the inconvenience caused by the climate protests – or the potential risk of someone dying in an ambulance caught in a hold-up – it is downplaying what are already the tangible, lethal consequences of the climate emergency. (...)

Nonetheless, the claim that there is widespread antipathy in Britain towards acts of civil disobedience on the climate is greatly overstated – and by the very same media outlets determined to play down the climate crisis. (...)

Despite this, the rightwing Conservative government in London has been progressively eradicating the right of protest – precisely to prevent actions to highlight its continuing crimes against the planet.

A spate of recent legislation has been designed to criminalise any expression of dissent. (...)

Actions like glueing oneself to railings, sitting in a road, obstructing fracking machinery or tunnelling can result in up to three years’ imprisonment. “Disruption prevent orders” can be issued to anyone who has attended a protest in the last five years, banning them from taking part in future demonstrations for two years. Activists’ freedom of movement can be limited by orders requiring them to wear an electronic tag or denying them entry to specified areas. (...)

One might have hoped that at least Britain’s opposition party would be vowing to reverse such draconian measures once in office. But Labour leader Keir Starmer has suggested he would legislate even stiffer penalties for those taking direct action on the climate. (...)

What all this represents is a shift over the past decade from one kind of political insanity – a denial, either implicitly or explicitly, of a climate crisis – to a different kind of insanity: official acknowledgment of a looming climate catastrophe but a refusal to do something meaningful to avert it. (...)

But even more troubling, wars seem to be increasingly useful as a distraction. (...)

In this way, wars helpfully deflect attention from the far bigger global crisis of the environment, one in which Western leaders cannot present themselves as the Good Guys – because they are, in fact, the worst, the greediest and the most destructive of the Bad Guys.

The endless War on Terror has served this purpose all too well over the past two decades, when the climate crisis should have been the world’s top priority. (...)

Instead the constant chatter in western capitals, on TV and in the press, is about how to find new ways to generate gas and oil for public consumption to overcome the energy crisis, not how to wean ourselves off these climate-destroying fuels. (...)

But in a world of self-inflicted collapse, Putin is no more insane than his western counterparts. In truth, the only sane people are those trying to wake up everyone else, whether by glueing their hands to the road, climbing bridges or hurling soup at paintings.

Hele artikel

> See also: Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis (Media Lens)

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #sea_level #ocean_level #water_security #drought #desertification #paris_agreement #cop26 #cop27 #government #international_cooperation #pollution #water #water_quality #supreme_court #lobby #rupert_murdoch #media #journalism #journalist #corporate_media #state #public_opinion #heat_wave #extreme_weather #food_shortages #deforestation #bush_fires #propaganda #public_order_bill #police_bill #disruption_prevent_orders #conservatives #labour #keir_starmer #starmer #sunak #rishi_sunak #energy #energy_transition #fossil_fuel #gas #oil #extinction_rebellion #just_stop_oil

‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate meltdown cannot be stopped, says expert

The Guardian

Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things are before we can head off global catastrophe, according to a leading UK scientist.

The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. (...)

As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacency in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. (...) “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.

In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left. (...)

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.” (...)

[I]t is already a different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.” (...)

“It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models. That’s something that was never expected.” (...)

At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

“In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.”

And we should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. (...)

From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further, McGuire says. (...)

As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will crash through it.” (...)

McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. . (...)

Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99

Complete article

> See also: Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis (Media Lens)

Record high temperatures and extreme weather events are being recorded around the world. Photograph: Ian Logan/Getty Images.

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #sea_level #ocean_level #water_security #drought #desertification #paris_agreement #cop26 #government #international_cooperation #pollution #water #water_quality #supreme_court #lobby #rupert_murdoch #media #journalism #journalist #corporate_media #state #public_opinion #heat_wave #extreme_weather #food_shortages #deforestation #bush_fires #propaganda

This heatwave has eviscerated the idea that small changes can tackle extreme weather

George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Dangerous heat will become the norm, even in the UK. Systems need to urgently change – and the silence needs to be broken.

Can we talk about it now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts – the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing the pundits are dust. (...)

This is not a passive silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. (...) But while the people who dominate the means of communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar becoming impossible to ignore. (...)

We have seen nothing yet. (...)

We do not deserve this. The billionaire press and the politicians it promotes may deserve each other, but none of us deserves either group. They are constructing a world between them in which we have not elected to live, in which we may not be able to live. (...)

They do so on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, animal farming, finance, construction firms, car manufacturers and airline companies, but also on behalf of something bigger than any of those interests: the power of incumbency. (...)

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to see that mainstream environmental movements have made a terrible mistake. (...) It goes something like this. There is too little time and the ask is too big to try to change the system. People aren’t ready for it. We don’t want to scare away our members or provoke a fight with the government. So the only realistic approach is incrementalism. (...)

But while they have been playing patience, power has been playing poker. The radical right insurgency has swept all before it, crushing the administrative state, destroying public protections, capturing the courts, the electoral system and the infrastructure of government, shutting down the right to protest and the right to live. While we persuaded ourselves that there is no time for system change, they proved us wrong by changing everything. (...)

Only a demand for system change, directly confronting the power driving us to planetary destruction, has the potential to match the scale of the problem and to inspire and mobilise the millions of people required to generate effective action. (...)

There was never time for incrementalism. Far from being a shortcut to the change we want to see, it is a morass in which ambition sinks. (...)

Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury, doughnut economics, participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. (...)

So let’s break our own silence. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and others by pretending that small measures deliver major change. (...)

But a major question remains. Given that we have left it so late, can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point?

Complete article

> See also: Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis (Media Lens)

The dangerous heat England is suffering at the moment is already becoming normal in southern Europe.’ A firefighter tackles a wild fire in Gironde, France, 17 July 2022. Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #sea_level #ocean_level #water_security #drought #desertification #paris_agreement #cop26 #government #international_cooperation #pollution #water #water_quality #supreme_court #lobby #rupert_murdoch #media #journalism #journalist #corporate_media #state #public_opinion #heat_wave #extreme_weather #food_shortages #deforestation #bush_fires #propaganda

Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis

Media Lens

(...) Increasingly, now, we do have citizens among us: scientists – particularly, climate scientists – who are awakening from their ‘mainstream’ slumber to the reality that they are citizens of a decaying society on a dying planet. (...)

To be fair, even veteran activists are asking themselves: ‘In what kind of world have we actually been living all along?’ For when it comes to anything other than maximising profit for corporations and pacifying the public, there appears to be no-one piloting the ship of state. (...)

The confusion and outrage are understandable. But why is climate denial still so prevalent? Why are so many people behaving as if there is no crisis? (...)

State-corporate interests generate and galvanise public fear into action with great efficiency when they want to. We need only think of World Wars I and II when millions of people were mobilised to kill and be killed to defend ‘democracy’, the ‘Fatherland’, the ‘Motherland’. After 1945, public fear and outrage were similarly brought to fever pitch by ‘red scares’ insisting that ‘The Russians are coming!’ As Zinn noted, the alarm was also rung to devastating effect in 1990 at the time of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. (...)

The same was true at the time of Nato’s assault on Serbia in 1999, also in 2003 when Iraq was invaded and conquered, in 2011 when the Libyan government was overthrown, and when the same attempt was made in Syria. (...)

This is why there is no sense of climate crisis, of emergency. It has nothing to do with human indifference; it has to do with people with authority and power – interests fanatically committed to expanding profits – NOT producing banner, front-page headlines of this kind:

‘CLIMATE COLLAPSE: THE WORLD LOOKS THE OTHER WAY. WILL YOU? OR WILL YOU BECOME VERY, VERY ANGRY?’

‘FOSSIL FUEL INTERESTS ARE KILLING US FOR SHORT-TERM PROFIT: THE WORLD LOOKS THE OTHER WAY. WILL YOU? OR WILL YOU BECOME VERY, VERY ANGRY?’

Far from alarming us, front page headlines are still literally celebrating indications of looming climate collapse. On January 2, the Sunday Telegraph front page featured a smiling, costumed performer at London’s New Year’s Day parade, under the headline:

‘Warmest New Year’s Day on record’

(...) Even when the impacts of climate change are not being celebrated, they are still being questioned. A BBC article asked:

‘Are soaring temperatures linked to climate change?’

How, in 2022, with everything we know, can this even be a question? By contrast, during ‘red scares’ and ‘the war on terror’, often bogus ‘threats’ were shrieked out as undisputed and utterly terrifying. Any expressions of doubt were reviled as genocide-denying treachery.

This surreal combination of celebration and denial is being produced in the context of devastating weather extremes that are only going to get much, much worse. (...)

More than 20 US states were experiencing dangerously hot temperatures impacting nearly 100 million Americans as grim footage was shared of thousands of cattle killed by dangerous temperatures, raising the much-feared spectre of global food shortages as temperatures continue to rise. (...)

It is reported that the current drought in Italy threatens more than 30% of national agricultural production. In Sydney, 50,000 people have been urged to evacuate their homes as floods hit Australia’s largest city for the third time this year. (...)

Climate scientists are warning that ‘every heatwave occurring today is more intense due to climate change.’ Heatwaves linked to climate change reportedly killed 157,000 people worldwide between 2000 and 2020, with four-fifths of those deaths during the 2003 European heatwave and 2010 Russia heatwave. (...)

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has been scathing in his denunciations of the fossil fuel industry and their political backers. Addressing a climate conference organised by the White House, he warned:

‘We seem trapped in a world where fossil fuel producers and financiers have humanity by the throat. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimise their responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies.’

He continued:

‘They exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.’ (...)

Scientists like Kalmus are now pleading with the corporate media to drop the denialism and phony ‘balance’, and hit the alarm button with full force:

‘The single biggest media failure of all time is how the media still isn’t treating global heating as an emergency.’

He added:

‘Climate journalists, the climate emergency just isn’t a normal thing to report. There need to be new rules/norms/practices when our entire planet is at stake. It’s a singular story.’

(...) How to escape state-corporate control of the means of mass communication?

It is a problem no-one has yet managed to solve. But a powerful step in the right direction must be for scientists to radicalise and mobilise – to look deeply and understand the true nature of corporate politics and corporate media – and to act together to demand public insurrection, rebellion and revolutionary change.

Complete article

> See also: It’s democracy v plutocracy – this is the endgame for our planet (The Guardian)

> See also: ‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness (Media Lens)

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #sea_level #ocean_level #water_security #drought #desertification #paris_agreement #cop26 #government #international_cooperation #pollution #water #water_quality #supreme_court #lobby #rupert_murdoch #media #journalism #journalist #corporate_media #state #public_opinion #heat_wave #extreme_weather #food_shortages #deforestation #bush_fires #propaganda

‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness

Media Lens
In the terrifying opening to his 2020 novel, ‘The Ministry for the Future’, Kim Stanley Robinson depicts an intense heatwave in India. (...)

This month, an intense heatwave did indeed hit northern India with temperatures reaching a record high of 49.2C in parts of Delhi. This was the fifth heatwave in the Indian capital since March. (...)

Meanwhile, the highest daily level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere was recorded. (...)

Scientists are warning that the 1.5C global heating limit set by governments is about to be breached. (...)

On top of all that, climate scientists recently reported that global warming could cause the most cataclysmic extinction of marine life in the past 250 million years.

If the news media were not owned and run for the benefit of state-corporate elites, all this would be huge headline news – day after day, month after month. There would be vigorous debate across all the main media outlets, building pressure on governments to implement the urgent radical changes required to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. (...)

For example, Corporate Europe Observatory, a non-profit research and campaign group which monitors and exposes corporate lobbying on EU policy making, recently warned that:

‘Fossil fuel giants are shaping the EU’s response to the energy crisis.’

Six big energy companies were named: Shell, BP, Total, ENI, E.ON and Vattenfall. (...)

In the never-ending corporate quest for profit, even as the planet’s life support systems are failing, oil and gas corporations ‘are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal.’ If governments allow the projects to proceed, these ‘carbon bombs’ will ‘trigger catastrophic climate breakdown.’ (...)

In this country [UK], the madness extends to all three of the main political parties – Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservative – calling for climate protesters to be ‘cracked down on’ and for their rational demands to be rejected. (...)

Veteran climate scientist James Hansen, who warned the US Congress of the dangers of global warming as early as 1988, injected some reality missing from ‘mainstream’ reporting:

‘There is no indication that incumbent governments are even considering the fundamental actions that are needed to slow and reverse climate change.’

As we wrote at the time, last year’s UN Climate Summit in Glasgow was a greenwashing festival, full of empty rhetoric. Last month, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it was ‘now or never’ to save humanity. (...)

Nasa climate scientist Peter Kalmus (...) warned:

‘Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk.’ (...)

It will take truly massive, sustained public activism – perhaps on a scale never seen before in human history – to shift course away from climate catastrophe. (...)

The historical record also shows that improvements in society are rarely, if ever, bestowed as gifts from above. Power typically only ever makes concessions when it is forced to do so by pressure from below.

Time is running out too rapidly to fundamentally reform society and create a real democracy that people deserve. The immediate priority is to exert insurmountable pressure on existing power structures, not least our own governments, to change course away from climate catastrophe. If we cannot do that, there will be no human civilisation to reform or restructure.

Complete article

Tags: #climate #clamte_change #climate_crisis #climate_beakdown #climate_protest #global_warming #heat_wave #india #media #corporate_media #news #news_media #journalist #journalism #Corporate_Europe_Observatory #Shell #BP #Total #ENI #E_ON #Vattenfall #fowwil_fuel #eu #european_union #ipcc #un #guterres #Extinction_Rebellion #Just_Stop_Oil