Cave lies in the shadow of Mount Damavand, which at more than 5,000 metres dominates the landscape of northern Iran. In this cave, stalagmites and stalactites are growing slowly over millennia and preserve in them clues about past climate events. Changes in stalagmite chemistry from this cave have now linked the collapse of the Akkadian Empire to climate changes more than 4,000 years ago.Never forgetting that Antarctica has lost nearly 3 trillion tonnes of ice since 1992 • It can be easy to overlook the monstrous scale of the Antarctic ice sheet. Ice, thick enough in many places to bury mountains, covers a continent roughly the size of the US and Mexico combined. If it were all to melt, as it has in the past, global sea levels would rise by 58 metres. While this scenario is unlikely, Antarctica is so massive that just a small fraction of this ice melting would be enough to displace hundreds of millions of people who live by the coast.
…
Added by Michael Grove at 9:32 on September 26, 2020
e position in the climate change debate. It is almost as if, simply by demonstrating their supposed credentials and commitment, the ‘answer’ and with it salvation, will be found. The ‘solutions’ to climate change repeatedly proferred by Western leaders, think-tanks and board rooms – technical fixes, managerial reorganisations and diktats from on high - recall the workings and mindset of defunct communist regimes. Put aside political ideology, however, and the notion that technocratic, scientific and political elites have’the answers’ by dint of their societal standing, practically ensures that the one thing rarely opened up to further examination is what drives their self-referential interests, values, hierarchies, mores, or - for that-matter - epistemologies, in the fist place. Even less discussed is the possibility that it might be exactly these imperatives which are acting as an intertial brake on meaningful action, or, worse still, lie at the very not of why we are in these dire straits. Mark Levene & David Cromwell June 2007 BE ASSURED our new masters of the globe are saying to us “rest assured we are not intent on destroying the world, but doing everything in our power to save it.” But the truth is that we most all individually and collectively question that assumption; and must do so by challenging the social, economic and political parameters within which these diverse elite actors (celebrities of al) assume a basis for action (or inaction) on climate change. The essential inadequacy of the elite postion rests on an unwillingness, indeed inability, to accept anthropogenic climate change as an inevitable consequence of their self-interested obsession with the need for ever continuing growth of our globalising economic system. Only by rethinking the operating premises of that are we likely to have any chance of moving towards a safer and more sustainable future.
…
in wildfires nationwide each year has increased over the past 20 years, and "although projections vary by state and ecoregion, on average, the annual area burned by lightning-ignited wildfire is expected to increase by at least 30 percent by 2060."
…
es?'
The result is a 40 minute film about the knowns and the unknowns of the science, about the risks, and about being hopeful for the future too. Interviews with Sir David Attenborough, Mark Lynas, David Shukman, Prof Dieter Helm, the UK Youth Climate Coalition, and Ross's grandparents among others, offer fresh perspectives on a subject that saturates the media, divides the public, and yet is still meaningless to many.
At a time when the hype is blowing over and people feel put off by scandals, Beyond the Brink seeks to lay out how things really stand now.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Generous sponsorship has meant the film is available for free for anyone to watch and use. You're encouraged to hold your own screenings and show your friends! But the success of the film relies on people knowing about it. Please help spread the word wherever you can if you like what you see and hopefully Beyond the Brink can help engage, inform and perhaps inspire people about the challenge ahead.
Please visit www.beyondthebrink.org to find out more.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Music by:
Goldrush | http://www.myspace.com/goldrushmusic
Graphics | http://soundcloud.com/graphics
Message to Bears | http://www.myspace.com/messagetobears
Stornoway | http://www.stornoway.eu/…