Thursday 10th of October 2024

the US military climate......

This week marks 23 years since George W. Bush declared a U.S.-led “war on terror” and the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are still suffering its consequences.

After the U.S. invaded Iraq, an estimated half a million Iraqis were killed and at least 9.2 million were displaced. From 2003-2011, more than 4.7 million Iraqis suffered from moderate to severe food insecurity. 

Over 243,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan/Pakistan war zone since 2001, more than 70,000 of them civilians. Between 4.5 and 4.6 million people have died in the post-9/11 wars.

 

 

The U.S.’ “war on terror” also escalated the climate catastrophe, resulting in local water shortages and extreme weather crises that are only getting worse. In 2022, Afghanistan had its worst drought in 30 years and it is facing a third consecutive year of drought. 

“The war has exacerbated climate change impacts,” Noor Ahmad Akhundzadah, a professor of hydrology at Kabul University, told The New York Times.

Meanwhile in the current moment, U.S. military assistance to Israel’s genocidal campaign is also intensifying the climate crisis.

As we look back across more than two decades of the “war on terror,” it is clear that many lives will be saved if we can bring a halt to U.S. military interventions throughout the world and simultaneously target the U.S. military’s catastrophic contributions to the climate crisis that threaten us all.

“The U.S. military is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world,” Taylor Smith-Hams, U.S. senior organizer at 350.org, a global climate justice organization, said at a workshop on the Impact of Current Wars on Climate Crisis at the Veterans For Peace (VFP) Convention on Aug. 17. 

“Militarism and war are key drivers of the climate crisis,” she added, citing fighter jets, warships and the U.S.’s massive constellation of military bases throughout the world.

Climate Effects of ‘War on Terror’

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 men committed suicide and took roughly 3,000 people with them by flying two airliners into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into a field in Pennsylvania. 

None of the hijackers hailed from Afghanistan or Iraq; 15 came from Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the Bush administration illegally invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and overthrew their governments, then killed, injured and tortured nearly three-quarters of a million of their people.

Beyond the terrible death tolls in both countries, a lesser known consequence of the “war on terror” was the exacerbation of the climate catastrophe, both in the countries targeted by the war and globally.

Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol excluded military emissions from the counting of national emissions figures, U.S. military emissions are significantly undercounted. Although militaries are a significant source of carbon emissions, little is understood about their carbon footprint.

One of the first studies to expose direct and indirect military emissions as a result of combat was conducted by Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, Kirsti Ashworth and Reuben Larbi. 

They examined the use of concrete “blast walls” by U.S. forces in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2003-2008, the first five years of Bush’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” to measure the carbon footprint of the war. Concrete walls and barriers were also used in U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Kandahar and Kabul, Afghanistan, from 2008-2012 during “Operation Enduring Freedom.” (Although these two wars did not bring freedom, their effects on the climate crisis are enduring.)

While occupying Baghdad, the U.S. military erected hundreds of miles of blast walls in order to control the urban population pursuant to its counterinsurgency strategy. “Effective weaponisation of concrete has an extraordinary carbon footprint,” Neimark, Belcher, Ashworth and Larbi wrote

“The large carbon footprint comes mainly from the amount of heat and energy in cement production, the main ingredient in concrete.”

The logistical movement of troops, convoys, weapons, supplies and equipment, as well as firepower itself, carry a direct carbon cost. Jet propulsion fuel for fighter jets is a major culprit. U.S. military fuel use is “one of the largest single institutional carbon polluters in modern history,” the researchers wrote. 

But the indirect emissions in blast walls that result from the concrete supply chains that furnish the U.S. military are also substantial, Neimark and his coauthors argue.

“Parts of Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average” New York Times international climate reporter Somini Sengupta wrote in 2021, and the war has intensified the impact of climate change.

Afghanistan ranks in the top 10 countries undergoing extreme weather conditions, including droughts, storms and avalanches, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported a year ago. Afghanistan ranks fourth among countries with the highest risk of a crisis and eighth on the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index of nations most vulnerable and least prepared to deal with climate change.

The story of what happened in Afghanistan provides a chilling example of the long-term consequences of war on climate change. Decades from now, Gaza, which was already vulnerable to the climate crisis before Oct. 7, 2023, will invariably suffer increased climate effects from Israel’s current genocidal campaign. 

“Climate consequences including sea level rise, drought and extreme heat were already threatening water supplies and food security in Palestine,” Nina Lakhani wrote in a January article in The Guardian. “The environmental situation in Gaza is now catastrophic.”

US-Aided Israeli Genocide’s ‘Immense’ Climate Effect

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has killed at least 41,000 Palestinian people, and likely many more. During the first two months of Israel’s genocidal campaign, emissions that warmed the planet exceeded the annual carbon footprint of over 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, according to a study by Benjamin Neimark, Patrick Bigger, Frederick Otu-Larbi and Reuben Larbi. 

Roughly 281,000 metric tons of war-related carbon dioxide were emitted in the first two months of the war following Oct. 7, 2023. More than 99 percent of these emissions resulted from Israel’s bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza and U.S. supply flights to Israel. 

The climate cost was equivalent to the burning of at least 150,000 tons of coal. Almost half of the emissions were caused by U.S. cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel. Hamas rockets fired into Israel accounted for the equivalent of 300 tons of coal, an indicator of the asymmetry of Israel’s war on Palestine.

“The role of the U.S. in the human and environmental destruction of Gaza cannot be overstated,” saidPatrick Bigger, coauthor of the study and research director at the thinktank Climate + Community Project (CCP). During the VFP workshop, Bigger called it an “environmental Nakba.”

David Boyd, U.N. special rapporteur for human rights and the environment, said, “This research helps us understand the immense magnitude of military emissions — from preparing for war, carrying out war and rebuilding after war. Armed conflict pushes humanity even closer to the precipice of climate catastrophe, and is an idiotic way to spend our shrinking carbon budget.”

“From an ecological perspective, there is no such thing as an ‘effective’ or ‘green’ technology or military,” Neimark, Belcher, Ashworth and Larbi, coauthors of the concrete blast wall study, found

While Israel touts itself as a global leader in climate change adaptation and mitigation, it is actually engaged in “greenwashing” — misleading marketing practices to make policies appear more environmentally friendly. Indeed, 

“Israel’s green technologies are fundamentally structured by the Zionist project of appropriating Palestinian lands,” Sara Salazar Hughes, Stepha Velednitsky and Amelia Arden Green argue in their 2022 article, “Greenwashing in Palestine/Israel: Settler colonialism and environmental injustice in the age of climate catastrophe.”

Israel’s systems of waste management, renewable energy and agricultural technologies (“agritech”) are actually mechanisms for appropriation and dispossession of Palestinian territory, according to Hughes, Velednitsky and Green. Although Israel promotes itself as a responsible steward of Palestinian lands, “Israeli sustainability sustains settler colonialism.”

“Climate crisis in Palestine cannot be detached from the Israeli occupation. The brutal and extensivelydocumented apartheid regime that Israel imposes and maintains over Palestinians is fundamentally incompatible with the tenets of climate justice,” Patrick Bigger, Batul Hassan, Salma Elmallah, Seth J. Prins, J. Mijin Cha, Malini Ranganathan, Thomas M. Hanna, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Johanna Bozuwa wrote for the think tank CCP.

Bigger and his coauthors cite Israel’s settler-colonial campaign to replace native olive groves with nonnative plants that reduce biodiversity, increase susceptibility to fire and put unsustainable pressure on natural resources. Palestinians, they write, are much more vulnerable than Israelis to the effects of climate change.

“While Palestinians are displaced to support Israel’s renewable energy industry, Palestinian solar projects are destroyed as ‘illegal constructions,’ having failed to secure permits from Israeli authorities.”

As the largest provider of military hardware to the Israeli regime, the U.S. government is “directly complicit” in Israel’s genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. 

“An immediate, permanent ceasefire and the end of U.S. funding for Israeli apartheid and occupation is needed to halt the ongoing violence and address the driving forces of climate breakdown in Palestine,” Bigger and coauthors wrote.

About 20 percent of the U.S. military’s annual operational emissions is devoted to protecting fossil fuel interests in the Gulf, which is warming twice as rapidly as the rest of the world, according to Neta Crawford, author of The Pentagon, Climate Change and War. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. and other NATO countries are largely concerned with climate change as a national security threat. They don’t focus on their contributions to it.

“Here in the U.S., our government continues to dump enormous amounts of money into death and destruction at home and around the world, while cutting social programs and refusing to adequately contribute to international climate finance commitments, always with the excuse that there isn’t enough money,” Smith-Hams said at the VFP workshop.

Our anti-militarism work should target the U.S. military’s devastating contributions to the climate crisis. Our future depends on it.

For more information, see the Climate Crisis & Militarism Project of Veterans For Peace.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace. A member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, she is the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.

 

https://truthout.org/articles/us-militarism-is-a-leading-cause-of-the-climate-catastrophe/

 

 

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

 

Колокольный звон над планетой

Ровно год назад сейсмологи всего мира зафиксировали необычный сигнал от земной коры, который менее чем за час прошел от востока Гренландии до Антарктиды. Сейсмические волны продолжались в течение следующих девяти дней, создавая эффект, словно Земля сотрясалась от удара гигантского колокола. Затем всё стихло.

В сентябре 2024-го учёным наконец-то удалось разобраться, что же заставляло вибрировать планету. Оказалось — так таял ледник фьорда Диксон на востоке Гренландии.

Колокольный звон над планетой

https://svpressa.ru/weather/article/429646/?lbq=1

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BY Maya Wei-Haas

 

In September 2023, an unusual seismic signal raced around the world, zipping from eastern Greenland to Antarctica in less than 1 hour. The seismic waves continued to radiate worldwide for 9 days, ringing Earth like a giant bell.

Now, scientists have tracked these mysterious signals to their source—a colossal landslide in a remote Greenland fjord that sparked tsunami waves up to 200 meters tall, the team reports today in Science. Like sloshing water in a bathtub, the tsunami resonated within the narrow valley, beating against the channel walls and creating the globetrotting seismic waves like “a big musical instrument,” says Stephen Hicks, an author of the new study and seismologist at University College London.

Although researchers quickly spotted the strange signal, they were initially baffled as to its cause. The waves were surprisingly uniform, monochromatic in frequency—far different from the jumble of waves generated by the jolt of an earthquake. The waves were also very long, repeating every 90 seconds. Similar long-period waves are often created by volcanoes, such as the ones generated in 2018 by the largest underwater eruption ever recorded. But these signals usually last for minutes or hours, not days.

Scientists at seismic observatories around the world were stumped. “I look at a lot of seismic data, and I’d never seen anything like this,” says Göran Ekström, a seismologist at Columbia University who is not part of the study team.

Perplexed researchers gathered on Mattermost, a chat app similar to Slack, to figure out the source. Suggestions ranged from volcanic eruptions to a fjord monster. “It was loosely classed as an unidentified seismic object,” or USO, Hicks quips.

He and his colleagues backtracked the seismic signals, but could only trace them to a large area in eastern Greenland. So they reached out to local scientists, who told them sea level gauges had recorded a large tsunami in the Dickson Fjord, an uninhabited valley near the signal’s source. Further detective work using satellite images and drone videos revealed the perfect storm of events that set the world shaking: A rockslide high above the valley pummeled a glacier that fed into the side of the fjord. Some 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice—nearly 10 Giza pyramids’ worth—careened down the glacial gully and plunged into the waters below.

When the researchers later visited the site, they found a dark band of sediments on the glacier’s face left by the tallest waves—evidence that they initially reached more than twice as high as the Statue of Liberty. The sloshing water scoured vegetation from the fjord’s shores, leaving them barren, Hicks says

But tsunami waves normally pass in minutes or hours, he says. Why did these persist for more than a week? Seeking answers, the researchers simulated the tsunami using high-resolution maps of the channel’s shape and depth. They found that a sharp bend toward the mouth of the fjord and a glacial dam at the other end prevented the tsunami’s energy from dissipating. Also, the landslide entered the fjord at a right angle, so it fired most of its energy at the opposite wall. The result was resonating waves some 7 meters tall that sloshed between the narrow channel sides for 9 days.

The new study highlights a surprising cascade of impacts brought on by climate change, Hicks says. Glacial ice within the gully had thinned in recent years, and the reduced thickness left the valley’s steep walls unsupported, making rockslides more likely.

The work also underscores the power of seismic data to detect hazards in Earth’s most remote places, Ekström says. Although no one was harmed by this megatsunami, people haven’t always been so lucky. In 2017, a landslide in the Karrat Fjord in western Greenland triggered a tsunami that killed four people and left two villages permanently abandoned.

Landslides and tsunamis can sever lines of communication, making it tough for remote communities to call for help. Yet a growing global network of sensors is constantly listening to Earth’s seismic cacophony, which could help rescue workers rapidly respond to catastrophes in even the most isolated places. “The data are there, it flows in real time,” Ekström says. It’s just a matter of tuning in.

https://www.science.org/content/article/megatsunami-remote-fjord-rang-earth-bell-9-days

 

 

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big melts....

At an altitude of 4,000 metres, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. 

A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process -- worried about the future.

She hiked six hours to get to the modest triangular-shaped hut that serves as a science station -- almost up in the clouds.

"Eight to 10 years ago you could see the glacier with snow," Omorova told AFP. 

"But in the last three-to-four years, it has disappeared completely. There is no snow, no glacier," she said.

The effects of a warming planet have been particularly visible in Central Asia, which has seen a wave of extreme weather disasters.

The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a shortage of water. 

Acting as water towers, glaciers are crucial to the region's food security and vital freshwater reserves are now dwindling fast.

'Measuring everything'

Equipped with a measuring device, Omorova kneeled over a torrent of melted water, standing on grey-covered ice shimmering in strong sunshine.

"We are measuring everything," she said. "The glaciers cannot regenerate because of rising temperatures."

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240916-disappeared-completely-melting-glaciers-worry-central-asia

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.