Glaciologist says carbon emissions to date will cause 69 foot sea level rise

By Chris Mooney / Mother Jones

Last week, a much-discussed new paper in the journal Nature seemed to suggest to some that we needn’t worry too much about the melting of Greenland, the mile-thick mass of ice at the top of the globe. The research found that the Greenland ice sheet seems to have survived a previous warm period in Earth’s history—the Eemian period, some 126,000 years ago—without vanishing (although it did melt considerably).

But Ohio State University glaciologist Jason Box isn’t buying it.

At Monday’s Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, DC, Box, who has visited Greenland 23 times to track its changing climate, explained that we’ve already pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide 40 percent beyond Eemian levels. What’s more, levels of atmospheric methane are a dramatic 240 percent higher—both with no signs of stopping. “There is no analogue for that in the ice record,” Box said.

And that’s not all. The present mass scale human burning of trees and vegetation for clearing land and building fires, plus our pumping of aerosols into the atmosphere from human pollution, weren’t happening during the Eemian. These human activities are darkening Greenland’s icy surface, and weakening its ability to bounce incoming sunlight back away from the planet. Instead, more light is absorbed, leading to more melting, in a classic feedback process that is hard to slow down.

“These giants are awake,” said Box of Greenland’s rumbling glaciers, “and they seem to have a bit of a hangover.”

To make matters worse, there’s also Antarctica, the other great planetary ice sheet, which contains 10 times as much total water as Greenland—much of which could also someday be translated into rising sea level. While Greenland is currently contributing twice as much water to sea level rise as Antarctica, that situation could change in the future. It’s kind of as though we’re in a situation of “ice sheet roulette” right now, wondering which one of the big ones will go first.

Box also provided a large-scale perspective on how much sea level rise humanity has already probably set in motion from the burning of fossil fuels. The answer is staggering: 69 feet, including water from both Greenland and Antarctica, as well as other glaciers based on land from around the world.

Read more from Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/climate-desk-greenland-and-69-feet-sea-level-rise

Sea Shepherd crew intercepts Japanese whaling ship

By Agence France-Presse

Anti-whaling activist group Sea Shepherd said Wednesday it had intercepted the Japanese fleet in its annual Southern Ocean hunt “before a single harpoon has been fired”.

Sea Shepherd claims to have saved the lives of 4,000 whales over the past eight whaling seasons with ever-greater campaigns of harassment against the Japanese harpoon fleet.

The militant environmentalist group said the Brigitte Bardot, a former ocean racer, had intercepted the harpoon ship Yushin Maru No. 3 in the Southern Ocean at a relatively northern latitude.

“Given that the large concentrations of whales are found further south, closer to the Antarctic continent where there are high concentrations of krill, this would indicate that they have not yet begun whaling,” said Brigitte Bardot captain Jean Yves Terlain.

Former Australian politician Bob Brown, who assumed leadership of the anti-whaling campaign from fugitive Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson due to legal issues earlier this month, said it was welcome news.

“It is likely that we have intercepted these whale poachers before a single harpoon has been fired,” said Brown.

Watson is wanted by Interpol after skipping bail last July in Germany, where he was arrested on Costa Rican charges relating to a high-seas confrontation over shark finning in 2002.

He is on board Sea Shepherd’s main ship, Steve Irwin, but has stepped down as skipper and has vowed to abide by a US court ruling in December banning the group from physically confronting any vessel in the Japanese fleet.

Read more from The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/29/anti-whaling-group-intercepts-japanese-fleet/

Guyana high court rules indigenous people cannot expel miners from territory

Guyana high court rules indigenous people cannot expel miners from territory

By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay

A judge in Guyana’s high court has ruled that indigenous groups do not have the right to expel legal miners from their land. The judge, Diana Insanally, found that if the miners in question held a government-approved license than the local community had no right to dispute the mining. The ruling has sparked protests by indigenous groups and is expected to be appealed.

“We are deeply disappointed and worried with this ruling and what it means to our village and to Amerindian communities in general. On the ground it has serious environmental and social impacts for us. The miners have, for example, brought with them problems related to drugs and prostitution,” reads a press release from the indigenous community Isseneru.

The controversial ruling came after gold miner, Joan Chang, took the the community of Isseneru to court for disputing her mining claim on their titled land. Isseneru village is located deep in western Guyana’s Amazonian interior. More than 75 percent of the country is still under forest cover, however mining, particularly gold mining, has been seen as a rising threat in recent years.

The recent ruling also opens up old wounds over just how much rights indigenous people have over their traditional lands.

“We feel that when the High Court tells us that we have no rights to decide and control what takes place on our land, then the land is not ours […] Just Friday, when inquiring at the office of the GGMC [Guyana Geology and Mines Commission], we learnt that our whole land is covered with mining concessions. Yet, the government has not informed us about this,” the Isseneru community writes.

Last Friday, 80 indigenous people protested the high court ruling outside the Office of the President.

“If this ruling goes forward then it will be a huge step backwards and will threaten indigenous peoples’ rights to land and to self-determination throughout the country,” says Jean La Rose, Programme Administrator at the Amerindian Peoples Association (APA).

New research shows common pesticides can kill frogs within an hour

New research shows common pesticides can kill frogs within an hour

By Damian Carrington / The Guardian

Widely used pesticides can kill frogs within an hour, new research has revealed, suggesting the chemicals are playing a significant and previously unknown role in the catastrophic global decline of amphibians.

The scientists behind the study said it was both “astonishing” and “alarming” that common pesticides could be so toxic at the doses approved by regulatory authorities, adding to growing criticism of how pesticides are tested.

“You would not think products registered on the market would have such a toxic effect,” said Carsten Brühl, at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany. “It is the simplest effect you can think of: you spray the amphibian with the pesticide and it is dead. That should translate into a dramatic effect on populations.”

Trenton Garner, an ecologist at the Zoological Society of London, said: “This is a valuable addition to the substantial body of literature detailing how existing standards for the use of agricultural pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers are inadequate for the protection of biodiversity.”

Amphibians are the best example of the great extinction of species currently under way, as they are the most threatened and rapidly declining vertebrate group. More than a third of all amphibians are included in the IUCN “red list” of endangered species, with loss of habitat, climate change and disease posing the biggest threats.

Brühl had previously studied how easily frogs can absorb pesticides through their permeable skins, which they can breathe through when underwater. But pesticides are not required to be tested on amphibians, said Brühl: “We could only find one study for one pesticide that was using an exposure likely to occur on farmland.”

His team chose widely used fungicides, herbicides and insecticides. The most striking results were for a fungicide called pyraclostrobin, sold as the product Headline by the manufacturer BASF and used on 90 different crops across the world. It killed all the common European frogs used as test animals within an hour when applied at the rate recommended on the label. Other fungicides, herbicides and insecticides also showed acute toxicity, even when applied at just 10% of the label rate, with the insecticide dimethoate, for example, killing 40% of animals within a week.

The study, published on Thursday in Scientific Reports [will be live after embargo], concluded: “The observation of acute mortality in a vertebrate group caused by commercially available pesticides at recommended field rates is astonishing, since 50 years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring one would have thought that the development of refined risk-assessment procedures would make such effects virtually impossible.”

A BASF spokesman disputed the findings: “This study was performed under laboratory ‘worst-case’ conditions. Under normal agricultural conditions amphibians are not exposed to such pesticide concentrations. According to our knowledge, no significant impact on amphibian populations has been reported despite the widespread and global use of the fungicide pyraclostrobin.”

Brühl said the method, a single spray directly on to the frogs, sometimes at just 10% of the label rate, was a “realistic worst-case” scenario. He added that in the field, multiple sprays of a variety of pesticides was likely and that chemicals might run off into ponds where frogs lived.

Sandra Bell, Friends of the Earth’s nature campaigner, said: “From frogs to bees, there is mounting evidence that the pesticide bombardment of our farmland is having a major impact on our precious wildlife. Strong action is urgently needed to get farmers off the chemical treadmill.

“As well as banning the most toxic products, governments must set clear targets for reducing all pesticides and ensure farmers have safe and thoroughly tested alternatives.”

Earlier this month, the world’s most widely used insecticide was for the first time officially labelled an “unacceptable” danger to bees feeding on flowering crops, by the European Food Safety Agency. The agency had previously stated that current “simplistic” regulations contained “major weaknesses”.

“There is an urgency to address [the amphibian issue] as pesticides will be applied again soon because it’s spring, and that’s when we have all these migrations to ponds,” said Brühl.

“We don’t have any data from the wild about dead frogs because no one is looking for them – and if you don’t look, you don’t find. But the pesticides are very widely used and so have the potential to have a significant effect on populations.”

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/24/pesticides-kill-frogs-within-hour

Time is Short: Misdirection & Target Selection, Part 1

By Alex Rose / Deep Green Resistance Colorado

We’re up against a lot. With hundreds of species going extinct every day, with the oceans being vacuumed of life, with the last vestiges of wild forests being felled or burned and the heart of the planet being torn up to poison the air, civilization is driving Earth towards biotic collapse. We can’t afford to waste time or energy with so much at stake; dismantling the society that is dismantling the planet is no easy task.

For more than 30 years now, the environmental movement has been working toward that end, yet in few (if any) circumstances have we been able to seriously dislodge the foundations of industrialism. Despite our best efforts, the species count continues to decline as the carbon continues to rise. Those we’re up against are well protected and have immense resources at hand to protect themselves from disruption.

Systems of power—such as patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, civilization—safeguard themselves through brute force. They react with overwhelming violence against those who oppose them. However, this isn’t the only tool available to those in power, and rarely is it the first to which they reach when they feel threatened. One of the more sinister and effective techniques is systemic misdirection.

Oppressive and destructive systems protect themselves first and foremost through disguise and deception. They hide their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, coaxing us into attacking dummy targets or symbols of their power, rather than the material structures that support their power. The results are ones we’re all familiar with (or should be): we focus our attention on specific symptoms of the problem rather than the underlying causes, and our efforts for political change are diffuse and uncoordinated, challenging only particular manifestations of larger oppressive power systems, rather than the systems themselves. We wander into a strategic dead-end, and energy is redirected into the system itself.

We are guided into a strategic dead-end, and our energy is redirected to bolster the system itself.

Breaking free of this misdirection-dynamic requires a thorough lifting-back of the veil that’s been draped over our eyes. It means focusing our efforts where they will be most effective, targeting critical nodes and bottlenecks within industrial systems to bring civilization down upon itself.

We need critical and strategic processes of target selection. One powerful tool towards this end is the CARVER Matrix. CARVER is an analytic formula used by militaries and security corporations for the selection of targets (and the identification of weak points). “CARVER” is an acronym for six different criteria: criticality, accessibility, recuperability, vulnerability, effect, and recognizability.

Criticality is an assessment of target value and is the primary consideration in CARVER and target selection. A target is critical if destruction, damage or disruption has significant impact on the operation of an entity; or more bluntly, ‘how important is this target to enemy operations?”  Different targets can be critical to different systems in different ways: physically (as in interstate transmission lines), economically (such as a stock exchange), politically, socially, etc.

It’s important to remember that nothing exists in a vacuum; society is made up of inter-related entities and institutions, and our targets will be as well. Thus the criticality of a potential target should be considered in the context of the way that target relates to larger systems. For example, there are thousands of electrical transmission substations all over the world, and hence they may initially seem non-critical. However, some substations carry a much greater load than others and are systemic bottlenecks, whose disabling would have ripple effects across entire regions. Criticality depends on several factors, including:

  • Time: How rapidly will the impact of the attack affect operations?
  • Quality: What percentage of output, production, or service will be curtailed by the attack?
  • Relativity: What will be affected in the systems of which the target is a component?

Accessibility refers to how feasible it is to reach the target with sufficient people and resources to accomplish the goal. What sorts of barriers or deterrents are in place, and how easily they can be overcome? Accessibility includes not only reaching a target, but the ability to get away as well.

Recuperability is a measure of how quickly the damage done to a target will be repaired, replaced or bypassed. Just about anything can be replaced or rebuilt, but some particular things are much more difficult, such as electrical transformers, few of which are manufactured in the U.S. and which take months to produce.

The fourth selection factor is vulnerability. Targets are vulnerable if one has the means to successfully damage, disable, or destroy them. In determining vulnerability, it’s important to compare the scale of what is necessary to disable the target to the capability of the “attacking element” to do so. For example, while an unguarded dam might seem a vulnerable target, if resisters had no means of bringing it down, it wouldn’t be considered vulnerable. Specifically, vulnerability depends on the nature & construction of the target, the amount & quality of damage required to disable it, and the available assets (personnel, funds, equipment, weapons, motivation, expertise, etc.).

Next is effect.  Effect considers the secondary and tertiary implications of attacking a target, including political, economic, social, and psychological effects. Put another way, this could be rephrased as “consider all the consequences of your actions.” How will those in power respond? How will the general populace respond? How will this affect future efforts?

Last is recognizability; will the attack be recognized as such, or might it be attributed to other factors (e.g. “It wasn’t arsonists that burned down the facility, it was an electrical fire”). Depending on the particular circumstances, this can cut either way; taking credit for an attack can bolster support and bring more attention to an issue, but it may also make actionists more vulnerable to repression. Recognizability also applies at a more individual level: were fingerprints or other evidence left at the site of the target through which the identity of the attackers can be determined?

Often, numerical values between 1 and 10 are given to each of the target selection criteria in the CARVER Matrix, and then totaled for each potential target. More generally, CARVER presents a critical framework for strategic planning and decision-making, helping us to avoid misdirected action.

It needs to be said that this sort of critical and calculated approach to resistance efforts applies to nonviolent & aboveground groups and operations as well as those that are militant or underground. Nonviolent resistance is too often distorted to fit romanticized ideas of a moral high ground, and is relegated to pure symbolism. But struggle (whether violent or nonviolent) isn’t about symbolic resistance; it’s about facing down the reality of power, identifying its lynchpins, and using force to disable or break them. The particular tactics we use determine the form the force will be applied in, but unless we identify and target the critical lynchpins, the daily destruction wrought upon the earth will continue unabated as we strike at the distractions dangled before us.

For too long our movements have fallen prey to poor target selection or misdirection. When we’re not too busy fighting defensive battles, we focus our energies on those entities which are either entirely non-critical to the function of industrialism or are invulnerable given our capacity for action. And the world burns while we spin our wheels.

In our next Time is Short bulletin, we will take a closer look at several examples of different actions, applying this analytical examination to better understand the importance and relevance of target selection in radical movements.

The forces we’re up against are ruthless and calculated; they’ll do whatever they can to keep us ineffective, and when that fails, they bring down all the repressive force of which they’re capable. If we’re to be successful in stopping industrial civilization, we’ll have to identify and undermine its critical support systems. We don’t have much time, which is why we can’t afford to waste it on actions, targets or strategies that don’t move us tangibly closer to our goals.

Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org