Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Climate Disruption's New Record: Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach Highest Point in 15 Million Years

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Climate Disruption's New Record: Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach Highest Point in 15 Million Years

Click here to access article by Dahr Jamail from TruthOut.

Under the criminal rule of sociopathic capitalists, humans are being led down the path to their destruction. Jamail nowadays specializes in providing data that show how we, under their rule, are rapidly altering the climate and making it unsuitable for human habitation. But then, we really don't want to know this, right? We much prefer watching on boob tubes the latest entertainment and infotainment provided to us by our corporate masters. (I'm in a cynical mood this morning.)

One of the most alarming indicators of ever-accelerating anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) this writer has witnessed since beginning these dispatches is the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide, in early February, reached a level not seen on the planet in the last 15 million years.

Thanks to humans, the earth was (since the 1990s) already experiencing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in a realm not experienced on the planet since the Pliocene epoch, which was the period 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide levels between 350 and 405 parts per million and average global temperatures that ranged between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius warmer than the climate of the 1880s.

Now we must brace ourselves for a new world, as carbon dioxide levels exceed even that epoch - a time when global sea levels were 80 feet higher than they are today.