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Earth Wars Episode 21: The Resistance Force Falls Into Deep Sleep

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Last week, the public briefly awoke from their over-consumption fantasy to witness the epic COP21 battle in the ongoing Earth Wars fought against the diabolically evil, fossil-fuel Order. Even the star-obsessed media took a rare break from its terrorism vigilance to cover the heroic Paris opera. The global media circus even helped to dispatch 3-minute sound bites hurled by 200 brave elders of the Earth Resistance against the invincible fossil-fuel Order armed with a superweapon of cash capable of destroying entire political systems.

The elders' sober warnings, uttered with exceptional gravity, made the dark carbon forces tremble in fear of loss and delayed profits. The decisive engagement to limit Earth's destruction to 2 degrees C went into over-time, until the billionaire knights rallied to the cause and promised to save the Earth with nuclear force. The elders hug and cheered, and champagne flowed like the river Seine at the Order's after party, and emissions-reduction bingo.

The media promptly returned to its round-the-clock Islamophobia, as hundreds of millions of the freshly saved lined up to see the new, highly-cliched, adolescent male phantasm. In a flash, the public went right back to sleep, oblivious to the ongoing attack of fossil-fuels and animal agriculture, the second leading cause of global warming, which was excluded from the Paris Agreement.

The inter-galactic fiction playing across thousands of movie screens this week is nothing compared to climate events happening outside theaters every day. With a rising spate of floods, heat waves, fires and other extreme weather, the Earth's global warming War is just getting started. While the Resistance sleeps, the Order's forces in Japan, Korea and India are redoubling their attacks with powerful coal emissions. The following is a sampling of this week's climate state of war.

The Earth Wars are going badly for the Resistance, whose few remaining forces are under siege. Sadly, in a huge defeat, the powerful warriors at the NOAA were themselves forced to hand over their private scientific communications to the Order's dark forces in a political witch-hunt congressional committee.

At one end of the battlefront, Australia saw temperatures climb up to 107 degrees F (42 degrees C) as the persistently warm weather increased dangerous fire conditions. And a report indicated heat stress could affect 700 million by mid-century.

While at another end of the front, the Bering Sea 'bomb' cyclone tied the record for strongest winter storm in North Pacific, with sustained winds equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane and gusts up to 115 mph. The Arctic is currently the hottest on record going back to 1900 and the region is home to one of the fastest climate actions on the planet. Average temperatures are 5.4 degreesF (3 degreesC) above what they were at the beginning of the 20th century, compared to an estimated global average of 1.8 degreesF (1 degreesC) over the same time.

Permafrost change in northern Alaska with far-reaching effects will come sooner than expected. At ground zero at one research site, the average temperature was 17 degrees F (-8 degrees C) in 1988, and now it is 28 degrees F (-2 degrees C). In many areas, the ground temperature will soon reach 32 degrees F (0 degrees C), the melting point of ice. Frightfully, melting permafrost releases large amounts of greenhouse gases, including potent methane.

The defeat in Greenland is impressive, with the ice sheet losing about 9,013 gigatonnes of water ice from 1900 to 2010. This melting alone has cause an inch of sea level rise, and the sheet is dropping mass at an increasing rate. Melting of polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers will continue for thousands of years, causing irreversible sea level rise and game over for many coastal cities.

Lakes are especially embattled with temperatures in 235 lakes, spread over six continents, rising several times faster than ocean temperatures. The results are dismaying. Lakes are warming an average of 0.61 degrees F every decade, compared to about 0.13 degrees F per decade for the earth's sea surfaces. And lake warming is even more pronounced at higher latitudes, reaching 1.3 degrees F per decade. Warming lakes can cause harmful algal blooms, which inhibit plant and animal life. They can increase methane emissions, and they threaten drinking water, energy production, irrigation, and food for populations across the globe.

In the Eastern battle zone, China issues another warning of widespread smog, and Beijing issues a second 'red alert.' The pollution index will exceed 500 in Beijing, and residents are encouraged to remain indoors at levels higher than 300. The US government considers a level of 200 as "very unhealthy." A Canadian company which started out bottling Rocky Mountains air as a joke has seen its product fly off the shelves, with its first shipment selling out in four days in China.

On the ocean front, there are 15 to 51 trillions pieces of plastic litter, three to 10 times more than previously estimated. A lot of this toxic rubbish is eaten, for example, deep-sea fish in the North Pacific ingest 12,000 to 24,000 metric tons of microplastics annually. Fish stocks are declining due to over-consumption and climate change, as global supermarkets sell seafood processed by enslaved children, women and men.

In the US, evil livestock forces increased antibiotic drug sales at factory farms, despite FDA guidelines, antibiotic resistance, and 120 multi-state outbreaks of food-borne infections. A dim glimmer of hope was yet another report showing how important reducing animal product consumption and wasted food is to mitigating catastrophic climate change.

This week's dispatch from the Earth Wars reveal that the evil Order's overwhelming fossil-fuel and livestock army are preparing for total annihilation of Earth's Resistance forces. But unlike the predictable plots of glorified hypermasculine violence on the Order's media, how the real-life Earth Wars movie ends depends upon the actions of its sleepy viewers.


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Dr. Moses Seenarine is a plant-based father and activist, founder of Climate Change 911, and the author of Voices from the Subaltern(2004) and Meat Climate Change (Available on Amazon)

Dr. Moses Seenarine completed an Ed.D in (more...)
 
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