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Green resource wars loom over global transition efforts
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Green resource wars loom over global transition efforts
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Cox and Cox – The New Great Game?
I’m anything but a mathematician. Still, the numbers should take anyone’s breath away. Last spring, South Asia experienced a staggering heatwave, with temperatures soaring daily and breaking records in parts of India and Pakistan. Worse yet, scientists have found that such heatwaves are now 30 times more likely to recur there than once upon a time, thanks to human-caused climate change. Similarly, this summer in the Northern hemisphere, Europe, China, and North America all had record-breaking droughts. The European one was the worst in at least 500 years; the ongoing drought in the American West is the worst in 1,200 years; the one in China simply broke all records. Major rivers dried up from the Rhine to the Colorado to the Yangtze, while people everywhere suffered.
And — if you don’t mind my using the word yet again — worst of all, a new scientific analysis of those droughts suggests that global warming has made them 20 times more likely to occur than was true a century ago. Mind you, with the continued staggering release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (only aggravated by the war in Ukraine), the global temperature is expected to rise yet more in the years to come, ensuring that such studies will have to be repeated and amended again and again.
Sigh… This means, of course, that the rush for some kind of green revolution seems beyond necessary and yet, as TomDispatch regular Stan and — a new author for this site — Priti Cox point out today, that’s easier said than done. As they suggest, trying to simply recreate a green equivalent of our present world, vehicle by vehicle, could prove but another formula for disaster. Tom
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