“Monsters Behind The Door”: Top Ten Dreadful Effects Of Climate Change

Oldspeak: “Radical changes in our climate are happening right now. As time passes and behavior is not significantly altered, conditions will worsen. Severe and unpredictable weather, intense floods, parched-land droughts, ultra-fierce tornadoes, super hurricanes, loss of the world’s glacial water towers, dying marine life, and rising seas, will occur with increasing frequency and intensity. Our ability to produce clean food water and air will degrade. Resource wars will proliferate. Civilization as we know it will break down. These things are pretty much guaranteed to occur if we continue on our current path. President Obama is touring to country exhorting people to push their elected officials to vote on gun control, trotting out victims of gun violence, earnestly reminding people not to forget about Newtown.  President Obama should be touring to country exhorting people to push their elected official to radically change our energy policy to renewable energy production. He should be reminding people not to forget about Victims of  Sandy. Many communities are still to this day destroyed, disjointed and decaying as a result of Supercane Sandy, yet Obama and Corporate Media remain silent on Climate Change and real, urgent transition to Green Energy. Still maintaining support for toxic energy like unnatural gas, nuclear, coal and oil. There is no gun control on dead planet. The economy doesn’t matter if we can’t breathe. Debt is irrelevant if we can’t eat or drink. Climate change is the preeminent threat to global peace, security, and health. It must be recognized as such before it’s too late.”

By Robert Hunziker @ Dissident Voice:

ur planet is already showing the stress of radical climate change, affecting the Earth right before our eyes. The climate is different from when we were kids, and it is changing more rapidly than ever before. Accordingly, the underlying thesis of this article is that radical climate change is/will be fait accompli with consequences so far reaching that everything we are accustomed to today will change tomorrow. The only question going forward is how the drama of this transformation impacts the planet and human lifestyle as well as its influence on the institution of capitalism.

To that end, it is doubtful today’s younger generations will recognize tomorrow’s world. Several trends that manifest the consequences of radical climate change already exist. Hence, extrapolating climate change’s impact into the future is not a guessing game. Rather, it is the intention herein to follow those discernable trends to judge what the world of tomorrow will look like.

Radical climate change is severe and unpredictable weather, intense floods, parched-land droughts, ultra-fierce tornadoes, super hurricanes, loss of the world’s glacial water towers, dying marine life, and rising seas, which over time will cascade into a fractured civilization with hordes of tribal groups roaming the planet in search of sustenance, similar to life under the emergence of Cro-Magnon 40-50,000 years ago.

The Top Ten ListNumber 10: The End of Alpine Skiing

There are 2,100 ski resorts worldwide, and in the United States alone snow skiing is a $12 billion industry that employs 211,900 people. However, “Winter as we know it is on borrowed time,” according to Elizabeth Burakowski, co-author of a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Protect Our Winters, a climate-themed research group.¹ Last winter was the fourth-warmest on record since 1896 with the third-lowest snow cover.

As a result of declining snow lines, the mayor of Biot, France made the decision, in 2012, to abandon the cable towers of the ski resort Drouzin-le-Mont, converting the ski area to low-impact alpine activities. “Medium-altitude resorts will have no future in 10-15 years because of climate change,” says local Biot official Jean-Yves Moraccchini.²

The iconic Chacaltaya Ski Lodge (Bolivia), since 1932, the world’s highest ski area at 17,785 feet, is permanently closed. The glacier is gone.

A United Nations Environment Programme predicts that more than half of the ski resorts in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria will be forced out of business over the next few decades as the snow line rises.

The average number of snow days over the last two decades of winters is lower than at any time since records began over 100 years ago.

Number 9: Glacial Lake Outbursts Floods Destroy Villages and Towns

The rapidity of glacial melt brings in its wake Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (“GLOFs”), which unexpectedly, and with amazing suddenness, destroy entire communities.

For example, “10 Killed, 60 missing as Glacial Lake Burst in Nepal.”³ Also, in mid 2010 in Peru a large slab of ice the size of several football fields broke off a glacier, plunging into a lake that created a tsunami-like wave 75 feet high, flooding four towns.⁴

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development has identified 200 potentially dangerous glacial lakes in the Himalayan region of Nepal, China, Bhutan, India, and Pakistan. The downhill communities are at risk of destruction, without notice.

The increasing frequency of GLOFs matches CO₂ levels on a graph with both events sloping upwards in lock-step fashion over the past 70 years. Thus, there is a direct correlation between increasing levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere with the frequency of GLOFs. The result is: Not only is the water source for millions of people disappearing with the loss of glaciers; indeed, entire villages, towns and cities are at risk of cascading GLOFs. It’s a double whammy!

Number 8: Desertification of the World’s Arable Land

According to the World Meteorological Organization, carbon dioxide (CO₂)-induced climate change and desertification remain inextricably linked because of feedbacks between land degradation and precipitation.

As a result of climate change’s impact on desertification, there are already regions of the world where environmental refugees are prevalent. The Asian Development Bank believes there may have been as many as 42 million environmental migrants over the past two years in Asia alone — a result of extreme weather events.⁵

The World Preservation Foundation claims that not only is climate change accelerating the rate at which deserts are growing, but desertification itself also contributes to climate change. When previously fertile land turns to desert, carbon stored in the drying land vegetation and soil is released into the atmosphere.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reports that 20% of arid regions have already become desertified, placing 2 billion people at risk of starvation, unless they become environmental migrants.

China’s Minister of Forestry Zhao Shucong says that desertification poses “the greatest challenge of our generation… more than 400 million people are struggling to cope with water shortages, unproductive land and the breakdown of ecological systems caused by rising temperatures, overgrazing….”⁶

In China 1,000 square miles of arable land is turning to desertification every year. Elsewhere, regions of Africa are experiencing the same problem to an extreme degree.

Number 7: Embedded Droughts

A recent study at Rutgers University and the University of Wisconsin ties rapid Arctic climate change to high-impact, extreme weather events in the U.S. and in Europe. Rapid warming of the Arctic, which is warming two times (2xs) faster than the planet as a whole, is altering the course of the jet streams, which, in turn, ‘wavier’ with steeper troughs and higher ridges. In this manner, weather systems throughout the northern extremes progress more slowly, bringing long-duration extreme events like droughts, floods and heat waves. This trend has been distinctly noticeable in Europe and North America the past few years, and it threatens the world’s food supply.

For example, a slow-moving jet stream was behind a ‘blocking weather pattern’ with a massive dome of high pressure across the U.S. that led to the remarkable March 2012 heat wave that sent temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast soaring into the 80s, as winter turned to summer overnight. Furthermore, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture claims the ensuing 2012 drought was the worst since the 1950s.

Embedded droughts have become worldwide events these past few years. In August 2010, Russian PM Vladimir Putin shocked the world by announcing a temporary ban on exports of grain and grain products from Russia because of the country’s worst drought in 40 years. In August 2012, Russia, once again, dramatically cut grain forecasts because of drought-stricken eastern growing regions.

Syria, a major part of the breadbasket of the Middle East, has suffered a series of serious droughts. From 2006-2011 up to 60% of Syria’s land experienced one of the worst long-term droughts and most severe set of crop failures in the history of the Fertile Crescent.

The past year India experienced its second major drought in four years. As a result, at times a billion people were without power, experiencing the largest power outage in world history as low hydropower resources and a strained power grid failed.

“From Ukraine to Yellowstone, in Pakistan and Kazakhstan, the skies have stayed clear, and the earth has been parched.”⁷

Number 6: Unprecedented Damage to Infrastructure

Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance company, says climate change has contributed to a five-fold increase in weather-related disasters since 1980.

An extensive study conducted by DARA, headquartered in Madrid, Geneva, and Washington, D.C. and Climate Vulnerable Forum (a global partnership of 11 founding countries) concluded: “Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP.”⁸

The University of Alaska Anchorage and the University of Colorado at Boulder claim damage from climate change will add $3.6 to $6.1 billion to public infrastructure costs in Alaska alone over the next two decades. Thawing permafrost, flooding and coastal erosion are the culprits behind the damage to roads, ports, public buildings, and pipelines, which are especially vulnerable.

Global reinsurance firm Aon Benfield / London recently concluded the U.S. had the world’s top two costliest natural disasters in 2012. Hurricane Sandy cost $65 billion and the U.S. drought cost $35 billion. Both events are demonstrative of extreme climate change characterized by severity of weather as well as atypical weather patterns. These are not normalized weather patterns like in years past.

Number 5: The Splintering of Nation-States

The U.S. military is already aware of the impact climate change will have on the security of nations as conflicts brew over competition for water, food, and land. A National Research Council Report, “National Security Implications of Climate Change for U.S. Naval Forces,” deals with the prospect of large groups of climate refugees migrating across borders.

Bangladesh is an example of a splintering nation-state as land degradation, frequent storms, floods, and droughts have caused 12-to-17 million Bangladeshis to move to India the past few decades. The arrival of the environmental immigrants in the 1980s led to extreme acts of violence.

The United States is a great example of how climate change can impact a nation. In the 1930s in the Great Plains prolonged drought conditions and dust storms caused 2.5 million people to pull up stakes and leave. In California, the immigrants faced beatings, and police were sent to the California border to prevent their entry.

In 1969 the arrival of environmental migrants from El Salvador to Honduras led to war between the two countries.

It is estimated that, because of drought, land degradation, and water scarcity 600,000-800,000 Mexican environmental migrants move to U.S. urban centers annually.

Climate change degradation of water and food sources is almost guaranteed to intensify environmental migrations within nation-states as well as between nation-states in ever-larger numbers, e.g., where will the hundreds of millions who depend upon the Tibetan glaciers for water migrate when the glaciers melt away? Will hordes of people follow the path of early humans by crossing the Bering Strait to the United States?

Number 4: The Demise of Capitalism

Radical climate change has already demonstrated a proclivity to coalesce groups of people together in opposition to capitalistic tendencies. For example, the Ecosocialist Contingent sponsored an event that brought tens of thousands together in Washington DC to the February 2013 Forward on Climate Rally opposed to Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, the archetype symbol of climatic damage that has nearly 100% corporate sponsorship.

Journalist Naomi Klein in an interview with Bill Moyers said: “We can’t leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest free-market failure. This is what happens when you don’t regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.”⁹

Klein believes one of the answers to the climate change menace is community control over the problem, not central planning and not capitalism per se. For example, the two countries where wind farms have been most successful are Denmark and Germany where community movements demanded renewable energy as a community-controlled business. Thus, a sense of ownership by the people becomes a building block for success. German Community Wind Farms are collectively owned.

Tellingly, where socialistic tendencies prevail, renewable resources thrive over fossil fuels. This fact is demonstrative of the inherent failure of capitalism’s free market solutions to climatic problems. The free market has, in fact, exasperated the climate problem whereas collectivism fixes the problem.

Capitalism does not fit in a world where the most basic resources are threatened. It has largely ignored renewables because of concerns over short-term costs as compared to fossil fuels in spite of the long-term damage to the environment.

China is a prime example of capitalism gone amuck. They discovered state capitalism in the 1980s, and already China will soon account for one-half of all the coal burned on the planet and 30% of worldwide CO₂ emissions. As a result, in January 2013 the citizens of Beijing wore surgeon masks on the streets and at work during the day.

Ever since China discovered the wealth effect of capitalism, worldwide CO₂ emissions have been on a tear and are at 393 ppm today, the highest they’ve been in millions of years when Antarctica’s coastline turned green with stunted trees. Antarctica contains 85% of all the world’s ice, and if only a portion of it melts, New York City will be under water. This is the ultimate risk of too much CO₂ spewed into the atmosphere, and unchecked capitalism in China may prove the point.

Capitalism’s penchant for profits does not fit a future that is dependent upon careful husbandry of the planet. Over time, the capitalistic model is destined to fail as the planet huffs and puffs for clean air, and similar to late 18th century France, humanity will likely overrun the ruling capitalistic order as climate change increasingly rears its ugly head.

Number 3: Marine Life Extinction

Imagine a planet without marine life.

It may be coming this century.

Ever since the industrial revolution, the oceans have absorbed 30% of global carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, excessive levels of CO₂ in the oceans inhibit marine species from extracting calcium carbonate from the water. This is similar, in a twisted manner, to the suffocation experienced by people walking the streets in Beijing, but marine life cannot wear protective masks nor can they stop acidification of their environment, which is caused by excessive levels of CO₂.

Ocean acidification today is at least 10 times faster than at any other time in history, according to Dr. Andy Ridgwell, University of Bristol, School of Geographical Sciences.¹⁰

As a result, scientists are already seeing the early signs of marine life extinction. For example, scientists at Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eliat, Israel have studied reefs along the Israeli coast of the Mediterranean Sea and found alarming evidence that the primary ‘builder’ of the reefs has recently gone extinct. The problem is acidification of the seawater.

Another example of the acidification conundrum: Pteropods are a free-swimming creature, a tiny snail with a protective shell that is directly threatened by acidification in the oceans. Pteropods are crucial to the marine food chain, eaten by animals ranging from tiny krill to giant whales and serve as an important food source for salmon, mackerel, herring, and cod. Scientists have already discovered Pteropods with weakened protective shells. The problem is: They cannot mature if their shell development is impaired by acidification in the oceans.

According to Dr. Alex Rogers, Scientific Director of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, OneWorld (UK) Video, August 2011: “I think if we continue on the current trajectory, we are looking at a mass extinction of marine species even if only coral reef systems go down, which it looks like they will certainly by the end of the century. That would, in my mind, constitute a mass extinction event… up to 9 million species are associated just with coral reefs…many of the symptoms that we are seeing of change in the oceans indicate that the effects will be much wider than coral reef existence… rising temperatures are already changing distribution of organisms….”

One hundred million tonnes of fish are eaten worldwide each year. Directly, or indirectly, the livelihood of over 500 million people depends upon fish. What happens if coral reefs and nine million species of fish go extinct? The resulting environmental migration effect will overwhelm the planet with hordes of desperate people, and personal wealth will suddenly be worth about as much as an aristocrat’s head in France, circa 1793.

Number 2: Loss of World’s Glacial Water Towers

The water towers of the world are melting… flat-out!

America’s Columbia Glacier, which flows into Prince William Sound, Alaska, has retreated 13 miles up the fjord over the past 30 years, and its current rate of shrinkage is 50 feet per day, or 8 times faster than 30 years ago. It is a dying glacier similar to glaciers all across the planet, like the Andes’ glaciers of South America where photos taken of the glaciers in 1983 as of today show half of the glaciers are gone. The World Bank claims over 100 million people are at risk because of the melting glaciers of the Andes, losing their water, irrigation for crops, and hydropower. This is happening much faster than climatologists ever thought possible.

Furthermore, contemplate this: The Tibetan plateau’s adjoining mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Karakoram, Pamir, and the Qilian consist of a vast mountainous terrain known as the Third Pole, containing 100,000 square kilometers of glaciers supplying water to more than one billion people. According to an article in Nature magazine, July 2012, Yao Tandong, a glaciologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Tibetan Research in Beijing: “The majority of the glaciers have been shrinking rapidly across the studied area in the past 30 years,” ever since China discovered state capitalism.

Furthermore, according to Cheng Haining, senior engineer at Qinghai Province’s Surveying and Mapping Bureau, seventy percent (70%) of the glaciers at the headwaters of the Lancang River (one of SE Asia’s most important rivers, known as the “Danube of the East”) have disappeared. Another study by the province shows 80 glaciers that provide water for the Yellow River (the “mother river” and the cradle of Chinese civilization) are shrinking, and the Yangtze River (responsible for 20% of China’s economy) is threatened as well. Here’s why: Meteorological stations in the area show temperatures are at 50-year highs.
What happens when the glaciers disappear? What happens to commercial traffic on the ‘Danube of the East’ when the final 30% of the headwater glaciers go away?

More importantly, the water supply for agricultural irrigation in both India (60%) and China (80%) is largely dependent upon the mountain glaciers. How will they irrigate their crops when the glaciers are gone?

The major rivers of Europe, like the Rhone River, depend upon glacial headwaters… but they are all melting away!

Number 1: Flooding of Coastal Cities and Island Nations

Biblical flooding will come to pass…

If the worst case of climate change happens, the great coastal cities of the world, like Miami, will be under water, but when it happens remains the big unknown; however, this worst case scenario also assumes the occurrence of a tipping point, which paleoclimatic history shows rapid and widespread changes have occurred repeatedly in the past. These tipping points of the climate can be triggered by an ice-sheet collapse (a distinct possibility in Antarctica), an extensive change in circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean, a rapid burst of methane (e.g. thawing Arctic permafrost), or a sudden shift in rainfall patterns. Once a tipping point commences, it is reminiscent of the Titanic’s initial collision with the iceberg; thereafter, there is no stopping the consequences.

Here is what Dr. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, Penn State University testified to the U.S. House of Representatives, Nov. 17, 2010: “Melting of all of the world’s mountain glaciers and small ice caps might raise sea level by about 1 foot (0.3 m), but melting of the great ice sheets would raise sea level by just over 200 feet (more than 60m). We do not expect to see melting of most of that ice, but even a relatively small change in the ice sheets could matter to the world’s coasts….”

However, Dr. Alley also cautioned the members of Congress that human-caused climate change might force the Earth to cross one of its tipping points. Then, all bets are off!

Catastrophe could occur quickly, according to Professor Stephen Pacala, Director, Princeton Environmental Institute, “There is a class of almost instantaneous climate change that I call ‘monsters behind the door.’ I call them ‘monsters’ because were they to occur today, they would be catastrophic.”¹¹

It is a fair statement that, if humankind continues to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at ever-faster rates (similar to what is, in fact, actually happening), a tipping point is on the horizon. As an historical example of this phenomenon, Scientists at UCLA and Cambridge, in a joint research effort (2009), identified a period of time millions of years ago when CO₂ in the atmosphere ran 400-to-600 parts per million (ppm) for a sustained period of time, causing temperatures to run 5-10 degrees F higher than today (similar to Greenland today, where temperatures are already running 5 degrees F higher), the Arctic was ice-free, and both Greenland and Antarctica were largely ice-free. Sea levels were 75-100 feet higher.

As of today, CO₂ in the atmosphere is at 393 ppm, and on the rise, and already at its highest level in millions of years!

Solution

The solution is worldwide conversion from fossil fuels to renewables.

This massive conversion program will lead to the most powerful economic growth ever achieved, with full employment!

And, it would rescue the planet from impending violent upheaval.

1. Joanna M. Foster, “Warming Ski Slopes, Shriveled Revenues,” New York Times, Dec. 7, 2012. [↩]
2. Agence France-Presse, “Climate Change may Force French Ski Resort to Shut Down,” The Raw Story, July 31, 2012. [↩]
3. The Hindu, May 5, 2012. [↩]
4. “Disappearing Lakes,” Newsweek, Jan. 1, 2011. [↩]
5. Tiermey Smith, “Climate Change, Desertification and Migration: Connecting the Dots,” RTCC (Responding to Climate Change), Aug. 14, 2012. [↩]
6. Rita Alvarez Tudela, “Fighting Desertification in China,” Aljazeera, Dec. 8, 2012. [↩]
7. Tim Lister, “The Driest Season: Global Drought Causes Major Worries,” CNN, Sept. 8, 2012. [↩]
8. Fiona Harvey- Environmental Correspondent, ”Climate Change is Already Damaging Global Economy, Report Finds”, Guardian, September 25, 2012. [↩]
9. Bill Moyers, “Journalist Naomi Klein on Capitalism and Climate Change,” Moyers & Company, Nov. 19, 2012. [↩]
10. Carl Zimmer, “An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification,” Environment 360, Yale University, Feb. 15, 2010. [↩]
11. Documentary on Climatic Change – Global Warming, narrated by Tom Brokaw, Discovery Channel, 2006. [↩]

Robert Hunziker (MA in economic history at DePaul University, Chicago) is a former hedge fund manager and now a professional independent negotiator for worldwide commodity actual transactions and a freelance writer for progressive publications as well as business journals. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

Horn Of Africa Famine: Millions At Risk In Deadly Cocktail Of War, Climate Change, Neoliberalism

Two-year-old Aden Salaad looks up toward his mother as she bathes him in a tub at a Doctors Without Borders hospital, where Aden is receiving treatment for malnutrition, in Dagahaley Camp, outside Dadaab, Kenya Picture: AP/Rebecca Blackwell

Oldspeak:”Militarism, globalization, resource extraction/exploitation, rampant unregulated financial speculation on food, historical & current pollution by the global north, support for ruthless dictators who serve foreign interests instead of native ones, obstructionist stances to climate and environmental policies that will help the global south adapt technologically and socially to climate change though not necessarily benefit financially the global north have spawned the epic disaster we see unfolding in the Motherland. And the disaster capitalist in agribusiness are licking their chops. This tragedy provides them with the perfect opportunity to foist their genetically modified frankenfood on weakened and desperate people, ostensibly benevolent, offering its seeds for ‘free’. At the same time legally absolving themselves of all liability for their products’ less desirable effects. The same script was drawn up in Haiti after their most recent disaster, but they rejected it, choosing instead to retain what little sovereignty they have left over their food supply. Hopefully North African farmers will do the same by echoing this sentiment: “We reject Monsanto and their GMOs. GMOs would be the extermination of our people.” -Doudou Pierre, national coordinating committee member of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security (RENHASSA),

By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez @ Democracy Now:

Guests:

Kiki Gbeho, country head in Somalia for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She is based in Nairobi and returned from Somalia last week.

Christian Parenti, is contributing editor at The Nation magazine and an award-winning author of several books, most recently Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. He visited the Horn of Africa for research on the book.

Related stories:

• Famine in Somalia, Horn of Africa Described as “Worst Humanitarian Disaster in the World”
• Red Cross Provided with Location of Secret Somali Prison Used by CIA
• Climate Chaos: Christian Parenti’s New Book Exposes How Global Warming Could Lead to Global Warfare
• Raj Patel: Mozambique’s Food Riots Are the True Face of Global Warming
• Somalia Declares State of Emergency After Intense Fighting

RELATED LINKS

• Read an excerpt from “Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence,” by Christian Parenti
• Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.” By Christian Parenti (Nation Books, 2011)

JUAN GONZALEZ: The United Nations has called an emergency meeting to discuss the Horn of Africa drought, which it says has already claimed tens of thousands of lives. Famine was declared in two regions of Somalia on Wednesday, where 3.7 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. Another eight million people need food assistance in neighboring countries, including Kenya and Ethiopia.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls the situation a “catastrophic combination of conflict, high food prices and drought” and has appealed for immediate aid. Writing in the Los Angeles Times today, he said, quote, “To save the lives of the people at risk—the vast majority of them women and children—we need about $1.6 billion in aid. So far, international donors have given only half that amount. To turn the tide, to offer hope in the name of our common humanity, we must mobilize worldwide.”

The World Food Programme’s director spoke about the conditions in southern Somalia and also called for urgent assistance.

JOSETTE SHEERAN: I’ve met here today people from all over southern Somalia. And there’s no food where they are. And what we’ve heard from them—I just heard from one woman who’s lost three of her children. And so, we’re calling on the world to really back operations to scale up very quickly to reach those in the epicenter, in the famine conditions in southern Somalia. It’s very dangerous and risky, but we have to reach people. They’re not making it all the way here to Mogadishu. These are the ones lucky enough to make it here. And even these feeding centers are overrun.

JUAN GONZALEZ: That’s World Food Programme director Josette Sheeran.

Meanwhile, the U.N. says that pastoralist communities in Kenya and Somalia have also lost millions of their livestock. Carcasses lie all over Kenya’s North Eastern Province as the worst drought in decades continues to ravage the region.

MOHAMED HADJI: [translated] To say the truth, for the past six to seven years, we have not had any rain here. The population was around 6,000 to 7,000. But since the drought became serious, the population has drastically reduced, and it is just a few of us remaining. The others have left and have gone to look for water in pastures elsewhere.

AMY GOODMAN: To discuss the situation in the Horn of Africa, we’re joined on the phone from Nairobi by Kiki Gbeho, the country head for Somalia of the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She has just returned from Somalia.

We’re also joined in our New York studio by Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. He visited the Horn of Africa as he researched his book.

Kiki, let’s go to you first in Nairobi. Explain the scope of the problem.

Kiki Gbeho—

KIKI GBEHO: [inaudible] recently in Somalia in two locations—Mogadishu, the capital, and a location called Dolo. In both places, we met people who had walked for weeks in search of food. Some people say that they buried children along the way. And what was most disturbing about what I saw and what I heard was that the people I met said they were the better off. They had a limited amount of resources left, and so were able to move. They said they fear for those who they had left behind. The situation is dire.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you feel needs to be done?

KIKI GBEHO: Well, we need to scale up to respond to the need immediately. At the moment, even though we have received some funding from donors, it is insufficient to meet the needs. When famine was announced on Wednesday, we said we needed $300 million in the next two months to scale up response. So, one of the key issues for us right now is resources to be able to respond.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And why do you think that Somalia has been so particularly hard hit in the Horn of Africa?

KIKI GBEHO: Well, it’s a deadly cocktail. We have the ongoing conflict. We’ve had several consecutive seasons of drought. And then we’ve had severe price hikes. Prices have risen in the last year by almost 300 percent. So, even though there is some food available on the market, it is simply out of the reach of the common person on the ground. So when you mix these factors together, you get what we have in Somalia at the moment. We have been talking about this since last year, so we can’t say that we are surprised. But we need to do—we need to take urgent action now, because tens of thousands of people have already died, but it is possible to save lives if we act now.

AMY GOODMAN: How did it get to this point, Kiki Gbeho? The warnings had been coming out for quite some time.

KIKI GBEHO: As I said, I think it is a deadly cocktail. It’s an ongoing conflict. We have challenges with access, so we don’t have, as you would see in other aid operations, large numbers of international agencies working on the ground. And then the global crisis, we see price hikes all over the world. The whole Horn is affected by the drought. And you end up where we are now.

I think that the good news in all of this is that we still do have the possibility to save lives. When we talk to the technical people on the ground who assess for us, they tell us, if we act now, if we take advantage of the upcoming raining seasons and plant, if we manage to get food into the country, if we manage to put cash in the hands of people, and if we manage to scale up our health interventions, we could prevent the situation from deteriorating further. At the moment, only two regions have been declared as being in drought, but if we don’t do something, we can see the remainder of the regions in the south quickly roll into the same situation.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, Christian Parenti, you’ve been to the Horn of Africa, and in your recent book you dealt with the effects of climate change and the situation that’s occurring in countries like Somalia. Talk about your sense of what’s happening.

CHRISTIAN PARENTI: Well, yeah, this was predicted long ago by people on the ground. We could see it coming. And the other guest is correct: it’s a combination of war, climate change and very bad policy, particularly an embrace of free market—radical free market policies by regional governments that mean the withdrawal of support for pastoralists, the type of people you saw with their dead cattle. There are no programs from the government of Kenya, for example, to help them drill new wells, to help them with veterinary services for their ill animals, to help introduce new forms of livestock such as camels.

And then, on a broader international stage, there’s the tolerance for really rank speculation by firms like Glencore and Cargill, which have a lot to answer for in terms of this famine. One of the key events that has driven up food prices was climate change last year—worst drought in a hundred years in the Black Sea region of Russia, major flooding in U.S. and Canada. That helped drive up grain prices by almost 100 percent. But it wasn’t just that, because Russia then imposed an export ban. Glencore actually publicly lobbied for Russia to ban exports, much of which went to the World Food Programme. For example, 95 percent of the World Food Programme’s wheat comes from these Russian contracts. So, these speculators, Glencore, encouraged the Russians to impose this ban. They do that. Prices go up. Glencore then has a $60 billion IPO. So there are these—even far from the field, there are these factors that help exacerbate this emergency situation.

Then there’s the deeper structural thing of undermining state capacity and also military support, historically and presently, for wars that have helped produce failed states like Somalia. I mean, Somalia failed in part because the U.S. supported it in a decade-long war against Ethiopia, which led to its collapse.

AMY GOODMAN: We just read in headlines, Kiki Gbeho, about the al-Shabab announcing that the ban on foreign aid groups remains in effect in their area. How does that affect the United Nations and all of the aid groups coming in?

KIKI GBEHO: Well, aid agencies have worked throughout. We say the situation is difficult, but not impossible. How they operate is they work with local communities, district by district. And in dialogue with these communities, they agree on targeting communities and providing assistance. Our only interest in Somalia at this moment is to save lives, nothing else. We welcome the previous statement by al-Shabab, welcoming humanitarian agencies to resume operations in areas under their control. And I think we will continue to reiterate that the need is to increase assistance to populations in acute distress. Our only interest in Somalia at this moment is to save lives, nothing else.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Kiki, what about this issue, as you mentioned, the 300 percent increase in food prices, and Christian was mentioning? Has there been any approach made to the suppliers of these grains about bringing their prices down, especially in these countries that are so hard hit?

KIKI GBEHO: Well, I think that it’s difficult. Partly, the previous speaker mentioned the fact that there is a failed state in Somalia. We do not have a government that controls the whole country and can therefore regulate. We believe that if we were able to get food into the country, and if we were able to put cash in the hands of individuals, it could work with—we could influence the market. But the price—the high prices are not something that’s seen only in Somalia. I believe it’s in the the whole Horn. And in fact, it is global. There are global factors at play here.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring in what happened this week at the U.N. Security Council, discussing the effect of climate change on peace and security. Security Council members debated whether the most powerful U.N. body should address climate change as a security matter. Speaking at the meeting, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, insisted it should.

SUSAN RICE: We have dozens of countries in this body and in this very room whose very existence is threatened. They have asked this Council to demonstrate our understanding that their security is profoundly threatened. Instead, because of the refusal of a few to accept our responsibility, this Council is saying, by its silence, in effect, tough luck. This is more than disappointing. It’s pathetic, it’s short-sighted, and frankly, it’s a dereliction of duty.

AMY GOODMAN: Christian Parenti, is this a shift in policy for the U.S.? What’s the significance of what Susan Rice said at the U.N. Security Council? We don’t usually think of the United States taking proactive stances on climate change. They were quite obstructionist, for example, at the Copenhagen climate change conference.

CHRISTIAN PARENTI: It’s not really a shift. I mean, it’s tricky when you first look at it. But really what’s going on is the Security Council, dominated by the U.S., France, and the U.K., with Russia and China as other permanent members, and then rotating members, is essentially making a move to impose itself and sort of, some would say, hijack the discussion around climate change within the U.N. process. Now remember, there’s also another U.N. process in which the U.S. is not demanding that there be action, but is stalling, and that is theUNFCCC negotiations for a successor agreement to Kyoto, and the U.S. has played a very destructive role in that.

And so, many countries in the General Assembly were saying, “Hey, you know, we’re already dealing with climate change. Yes, it is a security problem, but that doesn’t mean it should have a primarily military response, because that doesn’t work, ultimately. In the short term, maybe it works; in the long term, it leads to failed states. What we need is to deal with creating an international fund, which is part of these negotiations, which can transfer capital and technology to the Global South. It needs to be done within the context of the General Assembly.” And there are these ongoing negotiations that the U.S. has essentially almost sabotaged. And now the U.S. wants to appear proactive and use the discourse and methods that it dominates, which are military methods and control this through the Security Council.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And is that why Russia and China sought to block this effort? Or were there other reasons—

CHRISTIAN PARENTI: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —some of the stuff you were mentioning about Russia before in terms of food supply?

CHRISTIAN PARENTI: Yeah, yes and no. I think that there’s an element of those two countries, as emerging economies, wanting to push back against the OECD countries on the Security Council, but then there’s also the fact that, I mean, the Security Council is made up of historical polluters and current polluters. I mean, Russia is a major oil exporter. China is a major consumer of fossil fuels. So I think there were those issues, as well, that they’re hesitant to be brought to account on those issues.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have the Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee that voted yesterday to ban funding in next year’s budget for Obama’s initiative to support poor nations in adapting to climate change or pursuing clean energy. That doesn’t mean it has passed through the Senate, but it was voted.

CHRISTIAN PARENTI: Yeah, and that’s one of—that’s a sort of domestic analog to one of the key issues in these international debates, which is setting up $100 million—or $100 billion fund to help with adaptation and mitigation in the Global South. So, I mean, in the Horn of Africa, there is no state capacity, there is no money, for helping people to adapt to this extreme climate—i.e. bringing in new livestock, developing water-harvesting techniques, because it does rain in the Horn of Africa, but it usually comes down, due to climate change these days, as sudden deluges. So there needs to be technological and social adaptation to that.

This fund that will be part of the successor agreement to Kyoto is essential in that, and so the Republicans are signaling that they won’t have anything of it. And we should recall that, of course, the preceding agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, was signed by Clinton but not ratified by the Senate, so it never became force of law here in the U.S. And it had, as a result, very minimal impact internationally in terms of reducing carbon emissions.

AMY GOODMAN: Money that goes into the military versus into this kind of aid?

CHRISTIAN PARENTI: At first, it looks very proactive and necessary. There’s all this instability. But if you look historically at the role of U.S. military aid, it undermines stability. I mean, look at the U.S. role in Somalia. It supported Siad Barre until he collapsed, and there hasn’t been a military state—

AMY GOODMAN: The long-reigning dictator there.

CHRISTIAN PARENTI: Yeah, who started a war in ’77 against Ethiopia. Look at Pakistan—not the same region, but one of the most water-stressed countries in the country, just suffered a major drought. The U.S. has poured $20 billion in military aid into that country. It becomes less and less stable every year, and I would argue, as a result of flooding it with cheap weapons, developing these asymmetrical assets, and, you know, neglecting land reform and social justice. And that’s a country that is prime for, you know, relative state failure, state failure in some parts.

AMY GOODMAN: Christian Parenti, we want to thank you for being with us, contributing editor at Nation magazine, author of a number of books, including his most recent, just out, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence_. His violence”>first chapter is on our website at democracynow.org. And thanks so much to our guest in Nairobi, to Kiki Gbeho, head of the Somalia Office of U.N. Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Thanks so much for being with us.

Monsanto And Gates Foundation Push Genetically Engineered Crops On Africa

Oldspeak:“Curious. With food prices at all time highs (and financial speculators making a KILLING), never before seen drought plaguing the U.S. Southwest, Africa, Russia; floods wiping out whole crops, Monsanto and the rest of the biotechnology industry happen to be furiously developing genetically modified drought-resistant corn and wheat to ‘help fuel the worlds fight against poverty and hunger” Why is this frankenfood that has been shown to cause “infertility and have significant impact on the health of plants, animals and probably humans; a whole host of deleterious effects like toxic pesticides that remain present in the blood of mothers and babies,  rises in food allergies, diabetes, obesity, autism,  immune system dysfunction, asthma, cancer and heart disease, low birth-weight babies, and infant mortality being pushed on weak, malnourished, immunologically compromised peeple? Why are billionaire supposed ‘philanthropists’ like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates throwing so much money behind this demonstratably dangerous and inadequately researched food technology, even when the research shows that natural food production methods outperform GM food production? De-population and complete control over the world’s food supply are my guesses.”

By Mike Ludwig @ Truthout:

Skimming the Agricultural Development section of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation web site is a feel-good experience: African farmers smile in a bright slide show of images amid descriptions of the foundation’s fight against poverty and hunger. But biosafety activists in South Africa are calling a program funded by the Gates Foundation a “Trojan horse” to open the door for private agribusiness and genetically engineered (GE) seeds, including a drought-resistant corn that Monsanto hopes to have approved in the United States and abroad.

The Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) program  was launched in 2008 with a $47 million grant from mega-rich philanthropists Warrant Buffet and Bill Gates. The program is supposed to help farmers in several African countries increase their yields with drought- and heat-tolerant corn varieties, but a report released last month by the African Centre for Biosafetyclaims WEMA is threatening Africa’s food sovereignty and opening new markets for agribusiness giants like Monsanto.

The Gates Foundation claims that biotechnology, GE crops and Western agricultural methods are needed to feed the world’s growing population and programs like WEMA will help end poverty and hunger in the developing world. Critics say the foundation is using its billions to shape the global food agenda and the motivations behind WEMA were recently called into question when activists discovered the Gates foundation had spent $27.6 million on 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock between April and June 2010.

Water shortages in parts of Africa and beyond have created a market for “climate ready” crops worth an estimated $2.7 billion. Leading biotech companies like Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow are currently racing to develop crops that will grow in drought conditions caused by climate change, and by participating in the WEMA program, Monsanto is gaining a leg up by establishing new markets and regulatory approvals for its patented transgenes in five Sub-Saharan African countries, according to the Centre’s report.

Monsanto teamed up with BASF, another industrial giant, to donate technology and transgenes to WEMA and its partner organizations. Seed companies and researchers will receive the GE seed for free and small-scale farmers can plant the corn without making the royalty payments that Monsanto usually demands from farmers each season.

Monsanto is donating the seeds for now, but the company has a reputation for aggressively defending its patents. In the past, Monsanto has sued farmers for growing crops that cross-pollinated with Monsanto crops and became contaminated with the company’s patented genetic codes.

In 2009, Monsanto and BASF discovered a gene in a bacterium that is believed to help plants like corn survive on less water and soon the companies developed a corn seed know as MON 87460. It remains unclear if MON 87460 will out-compete conventional drought-tolerant hybrids, but the United States Department of Agriculture could approve the corn for commercial use in the US as soon as July 11. Monsanto plans to make the seed available to American farmers by next year.

GE crops like MON 87460 can only be tested and sold in countries that, like the US, are friendly toward biotech agriculture. WEMA’s target areas could add five countries to that list: South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique. The Biosafety Centre reports that WEMA’s massive funding opportunities pressure politicians to pass weak biosafety laws and welcome GE crops and the agrichemical drenched growing systems that come with them. Field trials of MON 87460 and other drought-tolerant varieties are already underway in South Africa, where Monsanto already has considerable political influence. Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are expected to begin field trials of WEMA corn varieties in 2011.

The agency that is implementing WEMA is the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), a pro-biotechnology group funded completely by the US government’s USAID program, the United Kingdom and the Buffet and Gates foundations. The AATF is a nonprofit charity that lobbies African governments and promotes partnerships between public groups and private companies to make agricultural technology available in Africa. The Biosafety Centre accuses the AATF of essentially being a front group for the US government, allowing USAID to “meddle” in African politics by promoting weak biosafety regulation that makes it easier for American corporations to export biotechnology to African countries.

WEMA and AATF swim in a myriad alphabet soup of NGOs and nonprofits propped up by Western nations and wealthy philanthropists that promote everything from fertilizer to food crops with enhanced nutritional content as solutions to world hunger. Together, these groups are promoting a Second Green Revolution and sparking a worldwide debate over the future of food production. The Gates Foundation alone has committed $1.7 billion to the effort to date.

There was nothing “green” about the first Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. As population skyrocketed during the last century, multinationals pushed Western agriculture’s fertilizers, irrigation, oil-thirsty machinery and pesticides on farmers in the developing world. Historians often point out that promoting industrial agriculture to keep developing countries well fed was crucial to the US effort to stop the spread of Soviet Communism.

The Second Green Revolution, which is focused on Africa, seeks to solve hunger problems with education, biotechnology, high-tech breeding, and other industrial agricultural methods popular in countries like the US, Brazil and Mexico.

Africa has landed in the center of a global food debate over a central question: with the world’s growing population expected to reach nine billion by 2045, how will farmers feed everyone, especially those in developing countries? The lines of the debate are drawn. The Second Green Revolutionaries are now facing off with activists and researchers who doubt the West’s petroleum and technology-based agricultural systems can sustainably feed the world.

The African Centre for Biosafety and its allies often point to a report recently released by IAASTD, a research group supported by the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization, and others. IAASTD found that industrial agriculture has been successful in its goal of increasing crop yields worldwide, but has caused environmental degradation and deforestation that disproportionately affects small farmers and poorer nations. Widespread use of pesticides and fertilizer, for instance, cause dead zones in coastal areas. Massive irrigation projects now account for 70 percent of water withdrawal globally and approximately 1.6 billion people live in water-scarce basins.

Increasing crop yields is the bottom line for groups like the Gates Foundation, but the IAASTD recommends that sustainability should be the goal. The report does not rule out biotechnology, but suggests high-tech agriculture is just one tool in the toolbox. The report promotes “agroecology,” which seeks to replace the chemical and biochemical inputs of industrial agriculture with resources found in the natural environment.

In March, a UN expert released a report showing that small-scale farmers could double their food production in a decade with the simple agroecological methods. The report flies in the face of the Second Green Revolutionaries.

“Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live – especially in unfavorable environments,” said Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report. “Malawi, a country that launched a massive chemical fertilizer subsidy program a few years ago, is now implementing agroecology, benefiting more than 1.3 million of the poorest people, with maize yields increasing from 1 ton per hectare to 2 to 3 tons per hectare.”

De Schutter said private companies like Monsanto will not invest in agroecology because it does not open new markets for agrichemicals or GE seeds, so it’s up to governments and the public to support the switch to more sustainable agriculture. But with more than a billion dollars already spent, the Second Green Revolutionaries are determined to have a say in how the world grows its food, and agroecology is not on their agenda. To them, sustainability means bringing private innovation to the developing world. The Gates Foundation can donate billions to the fight against hunger, but when private companies like Monsanto stand to benefit, it makes feeding the world look like a for-profit scheme.