Climate Alters Global Vegetation

Earth First! Newswire

Cross Posted from Climate News Network.

By Alex Kirby, Climate News Network

LONDON—The amount of vegetation in the world, and the way it is spread across the planet, has changed significantly in the last three decades, researchers say.

They attribute more than half the changes they detected to the effects of the warming climate, with people responsible for only around a third. Surprisingly, perhaps, they are at a loss to attribute about 10% of the changes unequivocally to either the climate or us.

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Messages from Ann and the Angels – 04/20/2013

God loves you… We can only receive as much help from the heavens as we are willing to open to. ©Ann Albers, All Rights Reserved Visit Ann’s Photo Site for more

Message from the Angels

My dear friends, we love you so very much. We have said this so many times and we will say it as long as we have voices to speak through, God loves you, dear ones, more than you can possibly imagine. God wants to assist you in your lives. And yet God has granted you, upon the earth, free will. The entire universe, by its nature, must respond to the loving vibrations you put out. Aspects of the universe will respond to other vibrations as well. We, the angels, only respond to love. It is in our very design. The universe is not designed to respond solely to your words or your thoughts, rather it responds to the energy beneath them. This is why you can pray with all sincerity, “God I need help. I need the bills paid. I need to be healed,” and see nothing happening, because beneath your words perhaps is an energy that says, “I have lack. I have ill health.” Instead dear ones do what it takes to get your energy aligned with your words and your prayers. This is why visualization often works. In visualization you align your imagination with that which gives you joy. And when you find that vibration within you, you are by your very energetic nature, calling it back unto you. When you do anything it takes to feel abundant – smelling the roses, sharing of your gifts with another, etc. – then you are by your very energetic nature, calling abundance unto you. God is not a parent who gives into your fearful pleas. God instead says, I will support your love, your joy, your growth into an awareness of who you are. I will support truth and only truth, and truth dear ones, is that you are abundant. You are well. You are pure. You are holy. You are loved. Can you find ways to feel those truths in your life, thereby creating them in ever expanding ways? We think you can! You can feel love by being loving. You can feel abundant by being generous. Any frequency you tap into in any way will bring more of that into your life. If you are only “giving to get”, that is not from abundance, but rather from lack. If however you give from a loving, and abundant heart, you cannot help but attract those qualities back into your life. You are creative, brilliant, and beautiful in our eyes. We are constantly whispering to you, “This path feels better. This path feels more loving. This path feels more authentic.” We try to guide you in joyful ways. Sometimes you insist on painful lessons… but in time, love will rise up within you and remind you that in the eyes of God, you ARE loved, and you are perfect as you are – even as you grow into a greater understanding of the truth of your being. And if by some chance you find yourself in fear, anger, or the darker spaces, dear ones, love yourselves. Be compassionate with yourselves. We can and do repsond to this love and amplify even the tiniest amount of love in miraculous ways. God Bless You. We love you so very much.

The Orwellian Warfare State of Carnage and Doublethink | Common Dreams

I am glad to see this article. Lately I’ve been having a lot of conversations about the disgustingly obvious parallels between Orwell’s creations and our day to day life in the current era. What has been most disturbing to me is how casually the majority accept this state as natural and normal and even defend it vigorously against any dissent.

From constant surveillance to constant warfare, from false flags and their scapegoats being killed to the blind acceptance of created “enemies” we seem to have woken up right in the middle of Orwell’s 1984 novelscape.

The Orwellian Warfare State of Carnage and Doublethink

by Norman Solomon

People react as an explosion goes off near the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon in Boston, Monday, April 15, 2013. Two explosions went off at the Boston Marathon finish line on Monday, sending authorities out on the course to carry off the injured while the stragglers were rerouted away from the smoking site of the blasts. (AP Photo/The Boston Globe, David L Ryan) After the bombings that killed and maimed so horribly at the Boston Marathon, our countrys politics and mass media are awash in heartfelt compassion — and reflexive doublethink, which George Orwell described as willingness to forget any fact that has become inconvenient.

In sync with media outlets across the country, the New York Times put a chilling headline on Wednesdays front page: Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim, Officials Say. The story reported that nails and ball bearings were stuffed into pressure cookers, rigged to shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast.

Much less crude and weighing in at 1,000 pounds, CBU-87/B warheads were in the category of combined effects munitions when put to use 14 years ago by a bomber named Uncle Sam. The U.S. media coverage was brief and fleeting.

One Friday, at noontime, U.S.-led NATO forces dropped cluster bombs on the city of Nis, in the vicinity of a vegetable market. The bombs struck next to the hospital complex and near the market, bringing death and destruction, peppering the streets of Serbias third-largest city with shrapnel, a dispatch in the San Francisco Chronicle reported on May 8, 1999.

And: In a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood. A dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots.

Pointing out that cluster bombs explode in the air and hurl shards of shrapnel over a wide radius, BBC correspondent John Simpson wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.

Savage did not preclude usage. As a matter of fact, to Commander in Chief Bill Clinton and the prevailing military minds in Washington, savage was bound up in the positive attributes of cluster bombs. Each one could send up to 60,000 pieces of jagged steel shrapnel into what the weapons maker described as soft targets.

An unusually diligent reporter, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, reported from Pristina, Yugoslavia: During five weeks of airstrikes, witnesses here say, NATO warplanes have dropped cluster bombs that scatter smaller munitions over wide areas. In military jargon, the smaller munitions are bomblets. Dr. Rade Grbic, a surgeon and director of Pristinas main hospital, sees proof every day that the almost benign term bomblet masks a tragic impact. Grbic, who saved the lives of two ethnic Albanian boys wounded while other boys played with a cluster bomb found Saturday, said he had never done so many amputations.

The LA Times article quoted Dr. Grbic: I have been an orthopedist for 15 years now, working in a crisis region where we often have injuries, but neither I nor my colleagues have ever seen such horrific wounds as those caused by cluster bombs. He added: They are wounds that lead to disabilities to a great extent. The limbs are so crushed that the only remaining option is amputation. Its awful, awful.

The newspaper account went on: Pristinas hospital alone has treated 300 to 400 people wounded by cluster bombs since NATOs air war began March 24, Grbic said. Roughly half of those victims were civilians, he said. Because that number doesnt include those killed by cluster bombs and doesnt account for those wounded in other regions of Yugoslavia, the casualty toll probably is much higher, he said. Most people are victims of the time-activated cluster bombs that explode some time after they fall, he said.

Later, during invasions and initial periods of occupation, the U.S. military dropped cluster bombs in Afghanistan and fired cluster munitions in Iraq.

Today, the U.S. State Department remains opposed to outlawing those weapons, declaring on its official website: Cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility. Their elimination from U.S. stockpiles would put the lives of its soldiers and those of its coalition partners at risk.

The State Department position statement adds: Moreover, cluster munitions can often result in much less collateral damage than unitary weapons, such as a larger bomb or larger artillery shell would cause, if used for the same mission. Perhaps the bomber(s) who stuffed nails and ball bearings into pressure cookers for use in Boston had a similarly twisted rationale.

But dont expect explorations of such matters from the USAs daily papers or commercial networks — or from the likes of NPRs Morning Edition and All Things Considered, or the PBS NewsHour. When the subject is killing and maiming, such news outlets take as a given the presumptive moral high ground of the U.S. government.

In his novel 1984, Orwell wrote about the conditioned reflex of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought . . . and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

The doublethink — continually reinforced by mass media — remains within an irony-free zone that would amount to mere self-satire if not so damaging to intellectual and moral coherence.

Every news report about the children killed and injured at the finish line in Boston, every account of the horrific loss of limbs, makes me think of a little girl named Guljumma. She was seven years old when I met her at an Afghan refugee camp one day in the summer of 2009.

At the time, I wrote: Guljumma talked about what happened one morning last year when she was sleeping at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5 a.m., bombs exploded. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.”

In the refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul, where several hundred families were living in squalid conditions, the U.S. government was providing no help. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the U.S. government was when it bombed them.

War thrives on abstractions, but Guljumma was no abstraction. She was no more or less of an abstraction than the children whose lives have been forever wrecked by the bombing at the Boston finish line.

But the same U.S. news media that are conveying the preciousness of children so terribly harmed in Boston are scarcely interested in children like Guljumma.

I thought of her again when seeing news reports and a chilling photo on April 7, soon after 11 children in eastern Afghanistan were even more unlucky than she was. Those children died from a U.S./NATO air strike. For mainline American journalists, it wasnt much of a story; for American officials, it was no big deal.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, Orwell observed, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State“.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/17

World is Unprepared as Climate Change Starvation ‘Disaster’ Lies Ahead: Report | Common Dreams

Millions of people will die of starvation across the world as agricultural yields are expected to tank and the price of food is expected to double by 2050 scientists warned in a new report released this week.

Corn in the hands of a farmworker in South Africa. Photograph: Greatstock Photographic Library/Alamy The culprit? Extreme temperatures, floods and droughts brought on by climate change, the scientists warned in this year’s US National Climate Assessment.

Lead researches of the study told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas.

Frank Rijsberman, head of the world’s 15 international CGIAR crop research centers, stated:

Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt.

The Observer reports:

America’s agricultural economy is set to undergo dramatic changes over the next three decades, as warmer temperatures devastate crops, according to a US government report. The draft US National Climate Assessment report predicts that a gradually warming climate and unpredictable severe weather, such as the drought that last year spread across two-thirds of the continental United States, will have serious consequences for farmers.

The research by 60 scientists predicts that all crops will be affected by the temperature shift as well as livestock and fruit harvests. The changing climate, it says, is likely to lead to more pests and less effective herbicides. The $50bn Californian wine industry could shrink as much as 70% by 2050.

The report lays bare the stark consequences for the $300bn US farm industry, stating: “Many agricultural regions will experience declines in crop and livestock production. The rising incidence of weather extremes will have increasingly negative impacts on crop and livestock production. Climate disruptions have increased in the recent past and are projected to increase further over the next 25 years.

“Critical thresholds are already being exceeded. Many regions will experience declines in crop and livestock production from increased stress due to weeds, diseases, insect pests and other climate change-induced stresses. Climate disruptions to agricultural production have increased in the recent past and are projected to increase further”.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/14-0

KEENAN, OPPT and FREEDOM

I do not pretend to understand what either Keenan or OPPT are doing. I do respect that there are so many things that must be done, and so many ways of perceiving the world and stages of the Shift to be at in any given moment, that I do not find it my place to tell any of them what they should or should not do.

I’ve always been strongly of the opinion that money is the defining mindframe of the kali yuga, of the cabal/illuminati control of humanity;the linchpin in the structure of power-over and control.

It does not, imho, matter WHAT you do with money as long as you are engaging with that mindframe and the structures designed within that mindframe, you are feeding the beast you are trying to kill.

Freedom does not require money, or memos, legal documents or courtesy notices. Freedom is inside of you and not outside.

Even after colonization for hundreds of years, after seemingly endless poverty, violence, destruction of our cultures, languages and history, diaspora of our people, and colonization of our very minds and souls(see Catholic church) I have still encountered many more free indigenous people than not.

It is, as a good friend of mine used to say, “in our bones”.

It is not only in our bones tho-it is in everyones bones, if only they would notice it, pay attention to it, use it.

Because as soon as ENOUGH of us recognize, act on and LIVE the reality of the freedom that is always with us, then more and more physical signs of outer freedom will be apparent.

One of my favorite things right now is Audre Lourde’s saying “You cannot tear down the Master’s house using the Master’s tools”.

I struggled for literally two decades to truly understand and *get* what she was talking about. Those words were the genesis of my intellectual journey toward decolonizing my mind.

Money is the Master’s tool, and it is not only his tool, it is the bricks and mortar, the two by fours and roofing shingles that make up his house.

You cannot tear down the house with say a hammer, so you throw that hammer aside saying-this will take forever! These master’s tools don’t work for me, I’m going to use God’s tools and you set that house on fire and it burns down.

Watching the flames you don’t notice the master has picked up the hammer and come up behind you-beating you in the head til you are dead.

What I *think* Keenan is trying to do is to take the master’s hammer and throw it down the well. He is using the master’s tools to keep the master from using them-at least that is what I *think*. Like I said before, I honestly do not understand what either Keenan or OPPT are really doing.

If it helps keep the cabals from using their money to kill us off as we abandon their destructive structures and the miserable mindframe they were created within, then it’s all good.

But the root of our freedom is in abandoning the structures of control, not taking them “back” (which tends to lead, as Orwell showed us in Animal Farm, to much more of the same)

Legal documents, memos and announcements are, like money, the tools of the cabal, the structures of control.

WE ARE FREE already, we always have been. Even while they were killing us by the millions (150 million indigenous killed in the last 500 years just in the Western Hemisphere)

That is the heart of the old saying “Its a good day to die” because going out to fight them, knowing death was certain was a choice of free people. They can kill you but they can never take away your freedom.

It is the FEAR that keeps us under control, enslaved, struggling. We may fear death, or harm to those we love, or suffering, starvation, homelessness-but whatever we fear, it is the fear that keeps us under control, keeps us from recognizing and using our innate, essential freedom to create the world we want.

People think that currency revalues, global accounts, St Germaine’s money etc will make them “FREE” but it can’t. It is a trick only.

Do we NEED the global accounts to release suppressed technology, to green the deserts, feed the people? NO!

RIGHT NOW there are tools, plans and people able to do all those things. The only thing stopping it is not enough people participating.

Money would help speed the release of suppressed tech, it would help us make things happen faster by moving resources more quickly but we CAN do everything we need to using only our own innate power, the power to choose, to act and to work together. The power to think creatively, to use others creativity and build on it.

Wangaari Maathai started an organization in Kenya to empower women, feed people and reverse environmental destruction and desertification. She did not have financial backing, she had LOVE. She had connections with other women, and the ability to make more-and of those other women to make connections. They changed the world for the better and are still doing so-and yes when they get more money they can do more and faster, but they did not WAIT for someone to “Release a FUND” in order to use their innate freedom to make their world better RIGHT NOW.

I’m just going to type these as a list, you can look them up by which interest you most-and see that what I described above with one woman in Kenya is true over and over again across this Earth: Permaculture, Masanobo Fukuoka, Vaclav Havel, Vandana Shiva, Taiake Alfred, Evo Morales, Zapatistas. Adbusters, Buckminster Fuller, ReClaiming, Circle Justice,Non-violent Communication/NVC, Miki Kashtan, Occupy, Yes!Magazine, Time Banks, Ithaca HOURS, Velcrow Ripper, Freecycle, Transition Towns, Relocalization, CSA’s, Boston Women’s Health Collective…there are hundreds more but each of these will lead you to more-some like Yes! will lead you to MANY more.

The problems on Earth are not big monolithic structures(tho those keep them in place) they are individual, localized and direct. We are able to address each localized expression of what we perceive as huge problems, directly in that localized field of action by local people engaging with the problem in it’s specific local form and resolving it.

Each time we do this it affects the morphogenetic field of that problem making it easier to resolve everywhere else. When local people use their innate strengths, creativity, wisdom, knowledge about the local environment, culture, people and conditions to resolve local expressions of “large global” problems, they not only improve their own lives, and affect the morphogenetic field of the problem-they gain from having solved the problem and are then more confident in their own power and freedom. Solving one problem often leads to solving many more.

We can share across boundaries and help one another, we can share solutions, ideas and even the work involved (like a global barn-raising;-) but there is no need for a central money based solution institution like The World Bank or the UN-we’ve seen how well those well intentioned solutions have worked over the last 60 years.

The fact is the ONLY thing holding us back is our own belief in our powerlessness. When we come together and act upon our visions using creativity, collective effort and determination(and often prayer and ritual as well) we are unstoppable.

So as much as I do respect and appreciate the efforts of Mr Keenan, the folks at OPPT who are sincere, and all the other money based efforts at change, I do not believe they are the only path, or even a necessary path for most of us. If Mr Keenan can take away the cabal’s funding for drones, chemtrails, endless war and the rest of their nasty tricks then he will indeed be a hero-but even if the people he is working for do turn out to be the “pigs that are MORE equal than others” (as Mr Orwell once explained it in Animal Farm)we will still remake our Earth into the world we want to see.

It may take longer, it may be harder, but every day more and more people are waking up. The Shift, according to the science in The Source Field Investigations by David Wilcock, is inevitable. It is physics, and will continue no matter what anyone does, we only make it easier on ourselves by going with the flow as a species instead of fighting it.

The power to create positive change is within us ALL, every single one. Every one on Earth IS ALREADY FREE. Even those who are still suffering greatly-I live in a bed and am limited ridiculously on a physical level, but I know I am free. They can kill me, they can make me sick, do all sorts of unpleasantness, but they CANNOT take my freedom if I do not choose to give it away.

When enough of us recognize that essential truth, the cabal will fall no matter where the money is.

The Victim Liked It | Derrick Jensen | Orion Magazine

Derrick Jensen has a wonderful way of cutting thru the doublespeak, programming and nonsense to show us the bare still bleeding bones of the Truth. He does this no matter what subject he is writing about, but I found his explanation of climate change deniers particularly pertinent to my own frustration in dealing with them.

To me colonization IS the culture of abuse-in order to function; colonization, hierarchy the culture of power-over instead of power within can only operate when people engage in abuse of one another, other living beings and the Earth herself. It is *inherent* and required for the system to function as intended.

A system where 1% of the people have 80% of the wealth, where untold billions go without adequate food, shelter or medical care while there is plenty of all of it going to waste is a system designed to abuse, to use abuse to meet its goals, and to engender abuse and abusive perspectives in those who are functioning parts of that system.

Heartfelt thanks to Derrick Jensen, and to Orion for publishing him-we need to see clearly now before it is too late. Everyone cries over abused children who die, but who will be left to cry if we destroy the entire PLANET?

Upping the Stakes

The Victim Liked It

Climate deniers and the cycle of abuse

By Derrick Jensen

Published in the March/April 2013 issue of Orion magazine

OCTOBER 2012 was the 323rd consecutive month for which the global temperature was above average. The odds of this happening randomly are literally astronomical: one in ten to the hundredth power. For comparison, there are ten to the eightieth power atoms in the known universe. So if all the atoms in the universe were white, except one was green, your odds of reaching blindly into a bag of all the atoms in the universe and picking out the green one would be greater than that of having 323 consecutive months of above-average temperatures were global warming not happening.

A sane person might think that in the face of this, and with life on earth at stake, the debate over whether global warming is happening would have ended. A sane person might think that in the face of melting glaciers and melting ice caps, we would be desperately discussing how to stop it. A sane person might think that after Hurricane Sandy ripped into New York City (the center of the universe, according to some), the denial would be over.

But this sane person would be wrong. In December of 2012, former head of the EPA and White House Climate Czar Carol Browner said, A majority in our House of Representatives appears to not even think the problem is real. Its sort of stunning to me because Ive never seen the breadth of scientific consensus on an environmental issue like there is on this. The next speaker at the event, a conference about the Clean Air Act, was Joe Barton, chairman emeritus of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce who currently sits on the Environment and the Economy subcommittee. As if to prove her point, he stated that atmospheric carbon cant be dangerous because its a necessity of life. In fact, he noted, he was exhaling carbon as he spoke! Q.E.D. Besides, he said, greenhouses are good things: Theres a reason that you build things called greenhouses, and thats to help things grow.

It would be easy enough to laugh at his stupidity if he werent in a position of power and using that position to help kill what remains of the planet. It would be easy enough to just label his denial stunning and move on. But his denial is part of a larger pattern, and articulating patterns is the first step toward changing them.

I first learned about the stages of denial from trauma expert Judith Herman, who said, Whether its genocide, military aggression, rape, wife beating, or child abuse, the same dynamic plays itself out. It begins, she says, with an indignant, almost rageful denial. Where global warming is concerned, there is plenty of rage, but, strangely, hardly any of it is directed at civilization or captains of industry for causing the warming that is contributing to the murder of the planet. Instead, it is primarily felt by those who deny that global warming is taking place, and is aimed at those who provide evidence counter to their denial.

Anger, according to Herman, is followed by the suggestion that the person bringing forward the informationwhether its the victim or another informantis lying, crazy, malicious, or has been put up to it by someone else. The first political piece I ever published was an op-ed about global warming in a regional newspaper. The first letter to the editor about my first political piece followed Judith Hermans script explicitly by calling me a liar. Im not alone. A Google search for global warming and liar brings up more than 33 million web pages. A representative sample of these includes a video called Al Gore, Liar; an article from Business Insider titled Greenpeaces Director Busted for Lying About the Effects of Global Warming; and A Political Whos Who of Global Warming Liars, which lists the politicians who believe in global warming. Heres how one blogger put it: Finally a real consensus on global warming: Its a lie. We can know global warming is a lie, according to this writer, because the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults [sic] shows that 69% say its at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs. This particular article has a bigger problem than the rank stupidity of pretending that a belief that some scientists may have falsified data means that the field as a whole is a lie, which is the belief that a poll of the beliefs of Americans (or anyone) implies anything about physical reality. Reality is determined by reality, not consensus.

There are plenty of instances where the deniers claim that those who believe in global warming are crazy. A few quick headlines: Insane British Global Warming Ad, Californias Insane Global Warming Initiative, Why the Global Warming Crowd Is Insane. As for the claim that those who believe in global warming have been put up to it by someone else, I recently read a global warming denialist screed with the title Follow the Money that Drives the Climate Warming Alarm, which described how the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis has been kept alive by the power of money for over two decades. According to one source, this money flows from the solar energy lobby, which of course is massive compared to the tiny oil and natural gas lobbies.

And what if the denialists efforts to discredit fail? There are a number of fallback positions to which perpetrators can retreat if the evidence is so overwhelming and irrefutable it cannot be ignored, or rather, suppressed, says Herman. These include the whole raft of predictable rationalizations used to excuse everything from rape to genocide: the victim exaggerates; the victim enjoyed it; the victim provoked or otherwise brought it on herself; the victim wasnt really harmed; and even if some slight damage has been done, its now time to forget the past and get on with our lives.

Right on script, global warming deniers accuse activists of exaggerating, never mind that the global warming we are witnessing now greatly exceeds almost all previous estimates. Just last week I read that new scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is worse than previously expected, rather than not as bad as previously expected. The article quotes Naomi Oreskes, a science historian with the University of California, San Diego, as saying, Were seeing mounting evidence now that the scientific community, rather than overstating the claim or being alarmist, is the opposite.

Other denialist claims that fall into the rationalization category: global warming is actually good for us (Warming Up to Climate Change: The Many Benefits of Increased Atmospheric CO2 was the name of a session at a recent conference of conservative lobbyists); global warming is natural (i.e., the planets fault); global warming wont harm the planet (and if it does, we just need to, as one pseudo-environmentalist puts it, play God and geoengineer it).

Judith Hermans articulation of this pattern has helped me recognize the maddening comments of climate deniers for what they are: a script more or less followed by most abusers. Its imperative that we recognize and call out this pattern. So long as we dont, we allow the abusers to choose the rhetorical field of battle. And instead of talking about what is to be done to stop this or that atrocity, we are stuck insisting that the atrocity is happening at all, that we arent crazy, or lying, or so on. The perpetrators thus keep us on the defensive. And no matter what proof we provide, they will never listen. Because the purpose was never to gain understanding, or even to debate: the purpose was, from the first to the last, to obfuscate, so that they can continue to exploit.

Sandy didnt break the denial. Hundreds dead in a massive typhoon in the Philippines didnt break the denial. Three hundred twenty-three months in a row of above-average temperatures havent broken the denial. As I write this, the eighteenth round of climate talks at Doha is ending the way previous talks have ended: with, as Reuters put it, no progress on curbing greenhouse emissions, and with the United States taking a lead role in denial and obstruction.

At some point, those of us who care about life on the planet have to confront not only the denial of others but our own denial as well, by which I mean our belief that if 323 months wont convince them, then 324 months will; that if after eighteen climate conferences global carbon emissions are higher than ever, then the nineteenth conference will lead to a different result. Weve got to stop wasting time trying to convince those who refuse to be convinced that reality is real, so that we can begin discussing how best to stop the rapid, unprecedented, undeniable warming of the planet.

Join the conversation. 20 comments so far.

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http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7380