'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
Why Climate Is an Emergency
John Scales Avery
The central problem which the world faces in its attempts to avoid catastrophic climate change is a contrast of time scales.
In order to save human civilization and the biosphere from the most catastrophic effects of climate change we need to act immediately.
Fossil fuels must be left in the ground.
Forests must be saved from destruction by beef or palm oil production.
9 December 2019 (UN News)* — Despite global progress in tackling poverty, hunger and disease, a “new generation of inequalities” indicates that many societies are not working as they should, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) argues in its latest report released on Monday [9 December 2019].
.
– While opening a newspaper or watching a TV program we are every day made aware of the plights of irregular migrants. Some recent examples among many – on 24 October, 39 Chinese nationals were found dead in a lorry trailer in Essex. They had apparently frozen to death within a refrigerator container with temperatures as low as -25C (-13F).
This while tragedies occur almost daily on the Mediterranean Sea. On 26 November, a rescue vessel found a boat almost completely sunken. It had three dead bodies aboard. Fifty-five migrants were saved.
Three of them were in a critical condition, and one died after reaching Melilla in Spain, where the migrants were brought in.
Three children were among the survivors, though a further ten individuals were reported missing. Nowadays, such news items pass by almost imperceptibly.
Every day, thousands of unfortunate human beings are trafficked all over the world to suffer underpaid, hazardous work, or prostitution.
Juba, 6 December 2019 (IOM)* – Nearly one million people have been drastically affected by flash floods following unprecedented rainfall in South Sudan. Thousands have been displaced from their homes and seen their livelihoods destroyed; many towns are completely submerged.
IOM responds to communities affected by the floods in hard-hit Ulang in Jonglei region of South Sudan. IOM /Olam Amum
Infants and young children most at risk of fatal complications, health agencies warn
Worldwide more than 140,000 people died from measles in 2018, according to new estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC). These deaths occurred as measles cases surged globally, amidst devastating outbreaks in all regions.
WHO/Daniel Hodgson
With every passing day, it becomes clearer that the military coup in Bolivia on November 10th was masterminded in Washington DC.
Bolivian president Evo Morales who is now in exile in Mexico.(Photo: Sebastian Baryli)
This reality will create yet a new difficulty in relations between the U.S. regime and Mexico to its direct south, because the Mexican Government, under progressive President Lopez Obrador, took the courageous and very meaningful step of providing refuge to the U.S.-couped Bolivian President Evo Morales and therefore posed overtly a resistance to the U.S. dictatorship.
Such a unique way of communicating in our species, takes place, from an ontogenetic point of view, in a true and real cognitive revolution which happens in the child when he or she is about one and a half years old, when he or she discovers the other children are also intentional agents.
(Greenpeace International)* — Extreme weather is becoming the norm. Droughts across swaths of China, catastrophic flooding in Venice, and fires in Russia, Brazil, Congo and recently in Australia have all been attributed to climate change. The arctic glaciers are melting. Even Antarctica is feeling the heat.
