Meditations and Molotovs – 07.24.17

On today’s program, Vince quickly runs through some current events, shares his reflections on what turned out to be a really useful gathering of progressive activists and organizers over the weekend, and mentions about some of the upcoming events taking place at PARC – Politics Art Roots Culture during the month of August. He also shares some of his first impressions of …

This Melting Glacier in Antarctica Could Raise Sea Levels By 11 Feet

The Earth’s climate, it seems, isn’t listening to the politicians that are insisting it’s not warming. The temperature continues to rise incrementally, and the globe’s large glaciers—giant vaults of stored water—continue to melt, releasing into the oceans. The global sea level, due to thermal expansion and glacial melting, continues to rise, building up a head of steam like a train …

Jeff Tollefson – Antarctica’s Southern Ocean May No Longer Help Delay Global Warming

Joellen Russell wasn’t prepared for the 10-metre waves that pounded her research vessel during an expedition south of New Zealand. “It felt like the ship would be crushed each time we rolled into a mountain of water,” recalls Russell, an ocean modeller at the University of Arizona in Tucson. At one point, she was nearly carried overboard by a rogue …

Camilla Alexander-White – The massive problem of microplastics

In today’s world, plastic is an essential raw material. Since their invention in the 1930’s, plastics have become ubiquitous in the manufacture of everyday products. In 2012 the plastics industry accounted for more than 1.4 million jobs in over 62,000 companies across the European Union.1 As useful and versatile as plastics are, however, their unchecked disposal on an unprecedented scale …

David Biello – Farm the Oceans to Help Stop Global Warming

The Southern Ocean is a forbidding place, mostly unvisited by humans. Winds of more than 120 kilometers per hour wreak havoc, and waves routinely wash up and over the bow of any ship that dares to venture so far south, drenching the decks in ice-cold sea spray that instantly freezes. Worse, rare freak waves can build to towering heights and …

Tim Radford -Antarctic glacier melt could raise sea level by 3m

LONDON, 21 May, 2016 – One of Antarctica’s great glaciers could become unstable if global warming continues at the present pace. As warm seas wash the ice shelf, the land-based mass of ice could begin to retreat, cross a critical threshold in the present century and then withdraw 300 kilometres inland. In the course of doing so it would spill …

Bill McKibben – The Time Has Come to Turn Up the Heat on Those Who are Wrecking Planet Earth

An interesting question is, what are you waiting for? Global warming is the biggest problem we’ve ever faced as a civilisation — certainly you want to act to slow it down, but perhaps you’ve been waiting for just the right moment. The moment when, oh, marine biologists across the Pacific begin weeping in their scuba masks as they dive on reefs …

What’s fueling the Clinton campaign?

HILLARY CLINTON couldn’t help but be spitting mad at the Greenpeace activist who confronted her last week about the money her campaign has taken from the fossil fuel industry, asking the candidate if she would pledge to reject such money in the future. “I don’t have–I have money from people who work for fossil fuel companies,” the Democratic frontrunner snapped, …

John Pilger – The Dirty Secret of Utopia

I had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region in the “red heart” of Australia. The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans who came …