Leonardo's DiCaprio's New Climate Change Documentary #BeforetheFlood

Watch a free screening of Leo DiCaprio's new documentary on climate change #BeforetheFlood right now.  Not sure how long National Geographic will have this free screening so definitely try to see it ASAP.  There's so much disinformation on this topic out there.

His previous documentary "11th Hour" can be viewed in full on vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/107108296

The Politics of Palm Oil

by Mae McCaw

By itself, palm oil is a plant-based/vegan/vegetable oil made from the fruit of the Elaeis Guineensis tree. It's been used in cooking for over 5,000 years (that should speak for itself; it's practically a godsend miracle food). With over 50 million tons of palm oil produced annually, it makes up 30% of global vegetable oil production and is found in roughly 50% of all household products in USA, England, Canada and Australia.  This includes various products such as baked goods, pizza dough, packaged bread, instant noodles, ice cream, chocolate, margarine, lipstick/cosmetics, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, detergent, other cleaning solutions, and biodiesel.

HEALTH BENEFITS

Palm oil actually contains a number of health benefits to the human body.

(1) Palm oil has ZERO cholesterol.

(2) It LOWERS plasma and serum cholesterol levels in humans confirming that its "impact on serum lipid and lipoprotein profiles compares favorably to corn oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, and olive oil".

(3) It "stimulates synthesis of protective HDL cholesterol and removal of harmful LDL cholesterol".

(4) It is HEALTHIER than coconut oil, b/c it has LESS saturated fat.

(5) It's RICH in Vitamin E.

(6) It is the ONLY vegetable oil in the world market that NATURALLY contains "tocotrienols"--an EFFECTIVE ANTI-CANCER agent.

MANUFACTURING BENEFITS

In today's world, it is most desirable to and commonly used by food manufacturers in so many other products, b/c

(1) it requires ZERO hydrogenation processing AND

(2) lengthens shelf life.

(3) It's cheaper to use palm oil otherwise the costs are so much greater to do this with polyunsaturated oil substitutes, b/c of their market price and required hydrogenation to yield the same results that palm oil can do naturally.  

SOCIAL BENEFITS

85% of the world’s palm oil is produced in Indonesia.  45% of Indonesia’s palm oil producers are smallholders who rely on the industry for their livelihoods, to lift them out of poverty. This enables them to do the following:

(1) Feed their families

(2) Buy clothing and other personal items

(3) Put a roof over their heads

(4) Send their children to school

INITIAL NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN TARGET

Palm oil was an easy target for a massive negative (health-harming) advertising campaign in a market dominated (70%) by GMO soybean oil. In the early 1990s, the FDA finally cracked down and made negative campaigning against palm oil illegal...one of the reasons is b/c they couldn't admit why coronary disease rates increased with products (especially baked goods) using palm oil substitutes, b/c as mentioned earlier, those substitutes contained saturated and hydrogenated fats and oils

TODAY'S NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN TARGET

Remember that the plant-based vegetable oil itself is NOT harmful to human health.  On the contrary, it possesses a number of benefits as mentioned previously.  The problem is the development expansion to manufacture palm oil in AFRICA and more importantly, SOUTHEAST ASIA (Malaysia, Indonesia)--the latter comprising 85% of global production. It is also manufactured in N. America and S. America. The expansion in Africa and Southeast Asia, however, has made a terrible impact on the environment using highly unsustainable measures.

DEFORESTATION

This alone has many impacts and threats to the ecosystem due to “slash and burn” techniques in order to clear native forests:

(1) 1000-5000 ORANGUTANS are killed ANNUALLY with 90% of their habitat obliterated in the past 20 years because of deforestation for palm oil production. The effects of this loss include the following:

• Orangutans are key primates responsible for maintaining the ecosystem, tasked with spreading rainforest seeds that can only germinate as it passes through the gut of the orangutan
• They cannot survive in the forest without food and a habitat (both of which are destroyed during deforestation)

(2) 300,000 other species are also threatened in the same way--injured, killed and displaced.

• Some well known animals include the Sumatran Tiger, Sumatran Rhinoceros, Sun Bear, Pygmy Elephant, Clouded Leopard and Proboscis Monkey.

(3) Climate change threatens global warming with the removal of rainforests contribute in controlling the global climate system as...

• Forests are burned to the ground (destroying primate habitats)
• Smoke rises into the air emitting massive quantities of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere  (Indonesia, 3rd largest carbon footprint in the world)
• Since the primary job of trees and plants is to filter the carbon dioxide and release oxygen through the process of photosynthesis, this is no longer possible with deforestation which means the air is filthier
• Land is drier (rainforests are key in creating precipitation), hence affecting weather.  “Forests pull in large amounts of water vapor from surrounding regions and from nearby bodies of water. As the vapor condenses into rain, the local atmospheric pressure drops. Which sucks in more water vapor from outside the forest. Which repeats the process. Creating a positive feedback loop. The whole rainforest-water vapor system is called a biotic pump, because the living forest matter is what’s moving the water.”

(4) Since the biosystem has been destroyed, land erosion occurs as well as pollution of rivers

(5) Encourages poachers with easier access to the jungles by road systems built in areas of deforestation

ROUNDTABLE ON SUSTAINABLE PALM OIL (RSPO)

In 2002, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) collaborated with industry stakeholders to come together to find solutions for the sustainable development of palm oil and to avail it to the global market without the threat to animals, land, and climate change. In 2004, this collaborated effort established the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil or RSPO.  Today, 40% of palm oil producers are members of RSPO.  For this reason, it is CRITICAL for consumers to support and purchase RSPO certified sustainable palm oil from plantations audited and found to comply with globally agreed environmental standards or the eight principles and criteria as devised by the RSPO.  

8 PRINCIPLES FOR RSPO ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS & CERTIFICATION

(1)  Commit to transparency

(2)  Compliance with applicable laws and regulations

(3)  Commitment to long-term economic and financial viability

(4)  Use of appropriate best practices by growers and millers

(5)  Environmental responsibility and conservation of natural resources and biodiversity

(6)  Responsible consideration of employees, and of individuals and communities affected by growers and mills

(7)  Responsible development of new plantings

(8)  Commitment to continuous improvement in key areas of activity

SUSTAINABLE PALM OIL RESOURCES

For more information on RSPO and sustainable palm oil, visit the sites below:

• Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil - http://www.rspo.org/
• World Wildlife Fund Global - (Click here)
• Sustainable Palm Oil Platform - http://www.sustainablepalmoil.org/
• Green Palm Sustainability - http://greenpalm.org/

You Can Turn A $2000 Shipping Container Into An Epic Off-Grid Home

All you need is around $2000 to begin building one of these epic homes – made from recycled shipping containers! Check out some of these amazing creations!

A luxury home doesn’t always necessarily mean thousands of square footage, towering great rooms and gilded toilets. Take these homes for example: to begin building one of these epic houses, all you need is $2,000.

That $2,000 will buy you a shipping container. What you do with that shipping container… well, that’s completely up to you. Some creative people have found a way to transform this rudimentary “room” with metal siding into luxury housing that blows us away. These homes are epic.

1.) A shipping container doesn’t have to be a closed space.

2.) Blue container? Run with it!

3.) Open up the metal boxes and let your imagination run wild.

3.) Open up the metal boxes and let your imagination run wild.

4.) *jaw drops*

5.) The shapes are basically the same, but wow.

6.) Utilitarian… and awesome.

7.) The best part about this one is that you know they made it out of shipping containers.

8.) This open concept was taken a step further with a sliding garage door.

9.) You don’t rob this house. Ever.

10.) Modern, yet … not.

11.) This is the kind of home that keeps a person happy.

12.) Already-made pool? Yes please.

13.) Recycled materials AND it’s good for the planet.

14.) This collection of containers is just epic.

15.) These are so inspiring.

If you enjoyed these what these people did with their containers then you will love this couple’s new tiny home.

The best part of the gallery that this Reddit user shared? The shipping containers are recycled materials, so you’re actually helping the environment if you invest in making a luxury shipping container home. You can’t beat a base price of $2,000. What a marvelous idea; share it with others by clicking on the Share button above/below this article.

Source: 

Reddit

Posted from http://www.trueactivist.com/a-shipping-container-costs-about-2000-what-these-15-people-did-with-that-is-beyond-epic/

Have scientists discovered how to create downpours in the desert?

• Technology created 50 rainstorms in Abu Dhabi's Al Ain region last year

For centuries people living in the Middle East have dreamed of turning the sandy desert into land fit for growing crops with fresh water on tap.

Now that holy grail is a step closer after scientists employed by the ruler of Abu Dhabi claim to have generated a series of downpours.

Fifty rainstorms were created last year in the state's eastern Al Ain region using technology designed to control the weather.

Dry as dust: The sand dunes of the United Arab Emirates, which sees no rain at all for months. Now a secret project has brought storms to Abu Dhabi

Plan: Scientists are attempting to make clouds in the desert to give man control over the weather

Most of the storms were at the height of the summer in July and August when there is  no rain at all.

People living in Abu Dhabi were baffled by the rainfall which sometimes turned into hail and included gales and lightening.

HOW TECHNOLOGY IS KICKING UP A STORM

The Metro System scientists used ionisers to produce negatively charged particles called electrons.

They have a natural tendency to attach to tiny specks of dust which are ever-present in the atmosphere in the desert-regions.

These are then carried up from the emitters by convection - upward currents of air generated by the heat release from sunlight as it hits the ground.

Once the dust particles reach the right height for cloud formation, the charges will attract water molecules floating in the air which then start to condense around them.

If there is sufficient moisture in the air, it induces billions of droplets to form which finally means cloud and rain.

The scientists have been working secretly for United Arab Emirates president Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

They have been using giant ionisers, shaped like stripped down lampshades on steel poles, to generate fields of negatively charged particles.

These promote cloud formation and researchers hoped they could then produce rain.

In a confidential company video, the founder of the Swiss company in charge of the project, Metro Systems International, boasted of success.

Helmut Fluhrer said: 'We have achieved a number of rainfalls.'

It is believed to be the first time the system has produced rain from clear skies, according to the Sunday Times.

In the past, China and other countries have used chemicals for cloud-seeding to both induce and prevent rain falling.

Last June Metro Systems built five ionising sites each with 20 emitters which can send trillions of cloud-forming ions into the atmosphere.

Over four summer months the emitters were switched on when the required atmospheric level of humidity reached 30 per cent or more.

While the country's weather experts predicted no clouds or rain in the Al Ain region, rain fell on FIFTY-TWO occasions.

The project was monitored by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world's major centres for atmospheric physics.

Professor Hartmut Grassl, a former institute director, said: There are many applications. One is getting water into a dry area.

'Maybe this is a most important point for mankind.'

State visit: Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the United Arab Emirates, accompanies the Queen at the Mushrif Palace in Abu Dhabi last year

Desert: Scientists created 50 rainstorms in Abu Dhabi's Al Ain region last year

The savings using the Weathertec technology are huge with the system costing £6 million a year while desalination is £45 million.

Building an ionising system is about £7 million while a desalination plant would be £850 million and costs a lot more to run.

Some scientists are treating the results in Al Ain with caution because Abu Dhabi is a coastal state and can experience natural summer rainfall triggered by air picking up moisture from the warm ocean before dropping it on land.

But the number of times it rained in the region so soon after the ionisers were switched on has encouraged researchers.

Professor Peter Wilderer witnessed the experiments first hand and is backing the breakthrough.

The director of advanced studies on sustainability at the Technical University of Munich, said: 'We came a big step closer to the point where we can increase the availability of fresh water to all in times of dramatic global changes.'

Cloud Ionization, Electric Rainmaking, and Laser-guided Weather Modification

by Jim Lee
March 26, 2014
CVNews

Filed under , Climate Change, Geoengineering, Aquiess, AST, ATLANT, Australian Rain Technologies, charge, Clear Sky Manager, cloud seeding, electric, geoengineering exposed, ILAP, Influence on the Local Atmospheric Processes, IOLA, ion, ionization, Ionization of the Local Atmosphere, laser, lightning, Meteo Systems,trigger, WeatherTec,

I know what you’re thinking, I must be crazy, right?

Though plenty of scientists would agree with you, a few companies are touting their ability to create rain from clouds that would normally produce none. This process is barely understood by the scientific community and has yet to become proven science, nonetheless these devices are being field-tested around the globe. Most people are unaware that weather modification by cloud seeding has gone on for years, and even less are aware of this new technology.



An ambitious project attempts to ionize the lower atmosphere and create conditions where raindrops can easily form.

Cloud seeding via ionization technology is highly controversial. When Meteo Systems deployed their WeatherTec system in Abu Dhabi and claimed to make it rain 50 times in the desert, this statement caught the ear of the World Meteorological Organization’s Expert Team on Weather Modification, who convened a meeting March 22-24, 2010. Their conclusion: don’t believe the hype.


WMO Statement – Large-scale weather modification should be treated with suspicion – like Geoengineering SRM

Not to be dismayed, companies like Meteo Systems continue to make claims while experimenting in our skies. This article will list companies and technology involved in artificial ionization, electric rainmaking, fog dispersal, and atmospheric pollution removal.

Meteo Systems – WeatherTec™
www.meteo-systems.com

WEATHERTEC™ is the new leading-edge technology to secure the future supply of freshwater in many areas of need. It also has other applications to reduce some of the most negative impacts of weather.
WeatherTec™ uses electrical charge to create attractive forces between particles:
If supercooled droplets touch certain particles (called contact freezing nuclei) they will freeze instantly into ice particles
The electric charge caused by WeatherTec™ increases the likelihood that this will occur




WeatherTec cloud ionizers were used in Abu Dhabi for precipitation enhancement, with claimed results of making it rain over 50 times when forecasters expected no rain. Their system employs radio frequency antennas to emit negatively charged ions which statically charge clouds, increasing water drop size, causing precipitation. An easier way to put it is the antennas create statically charged dust particles in the cloud that attracts water vapor, forming droplets that fall to the ground.

NASA: California Has One Year of Water Left

BY ZOË SCHLANGER 3/13/15

Uvas Reservoir, Santa Clara County, California. DON DEBOLD/FLICKR

FILED UNDER: U.S., Drought, California

Plagued by prolonged drought, California now has only enough water to get it through the next year, according to NASA.

In an op-ed published Thursday by the Los Angeles Times, Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, painted a dire picture of the state's water crisis. California, he writes, has lost around 12 million acre-feet of stored water every year since 2011. In the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, the combined water sources of snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil water and groundwater amounted to a volume that was 34 million acre-feet below normal levels in 2014. And there is no relief in sight.

"As our 'wet' season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows" Famiglietti writes. "We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too."

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that one-third of the monitoring stations in California’s Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountains have recorded the lowest snowpack ever measured.

"Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing,” Famiglietti writes.

He criticized Californian officials for their lack of long-term planning for how to cope with this drought, and future droughts, beyond "staying in emergency mode and praying for rain."

Last month, new research by scientists at NASA, Cornell University and Columbia University pointed to a "remarkably drier future" for California and other Western states amid a rapidly-changing climate. "Megadroughts," the study's authors wrote, are likely to begin between 2050 and 2099, and could each last between 10 years and several decades.

With that future in mind, Famiglietti says, "immediate mandatory water rationing" should be implemented in the state, accompanied by the swift formation of regulatory agencies to rigorously monitor groundwater and ensure that it is being used in a sustainable way—as opposed to the "excessive and unsustainable" groundwater extraction for agriculture that, he says, is partly responsible for massive groundwater losses that are causing land in the highly irrigated Central Valley to sink by one foot or more every year.

Various local ordinances have curtailed excessive water use for activities like filling fountains and irrigating lawns. But planning for California's "harrowing future" of more and longer droughts "will require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon," Famiglietti writes. "Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin."

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

by Naomi Klein
The Guardian

Avoice came over the intercom: would the passengers of Flight 3935, scheduled to depart Washington DC, for Charleston, South Carolina, kindly collect their carry-on luggage and get off the plane. They went down the stairs and gathered on the hot tarmac. There they saw something unusual: the wheels of the US Airways jet had sunk into the black pavement as if it were wet cement. The wheels were lodged so deep, in fact, that the truck that came to tow the plane away couldn’t pry it loose. The airline had hoped that without the added weight of the flight’s 35 passengers, the aircraft would be light enough to pull. It wasn’t. Someone posted a picture: “Why is my flight cancelled? Because DC is so damn hot that our plane sank four inches into the pavement.”

Eventually, a larger, more powerful vehicle was brought in to tow the plane and this time it worked; the plane finally took off, three hours behind schedule. A spokesperson for the airline blamed the incident on “very unusual temperatures”.

The temperatures in the summer of 2012 were indeed unusually hot. (As they were the year before and the year after.) And it’s no mystery why this has been happening: the profligate burning of fossil fuels, the very thing that US Airways was bound and determined to do despite the inconvenience presented by a melting tarmac. This irony – the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing our climate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels – did not stop the passengers of Flight 3935 from re-embarking and continuing their journeys. Nor was climate change mentioned in any of the major news coverage of the incident.

I am in no position to judge these passengers. All of us who live high consumer lifestyles, wherever we happen to reside, are, metaphorically, passengers on Flight 3935. Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of elbow grease behind it. Like the airline bringing in a truck with a more powerful engine to tow that plane, the global economy is upping the ante from conventional sources of fossil fuels to even dirtier and more dangerous versions – bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, oil from deepwater drilling, gas fromhydraulic fracturing (fracking), coal from detonated mountains, and so on.

Meanwhile, each supercharged natural disaster produces new irony laden snapshots of a climate increasingly inhospitable to the very industries most responsible for its warming. Like the 2013 historic floods in Calgary that forced the head offices of the oil companies mining the Alberta tar sands to go dark and send their employees home, while a train carrying flammable petroleum products teetered on the edge of a disintegrating rail bridge. Or the drought that hit the Mississippi river one year earlier, pushing water levels so low that barges loaded with oil and coal were unable to move for days, while they waited for the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge a channel (they had to appropriate funds allocated to rebuild from the previous year’s historic flooding along the same waterway). Or the coal-fired power plants in other parts of the country that were temporarily shut down because the waterways that they draw on to cool their machinery were either too hot or too dry (or, in some cases, both).

Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive in this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face – and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place.

I denied climate change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening, sure. Not like Donald Trump and the Tea Partiers going on about how the continued existence of winter proves it’s all a hoax. But I stayed pretty hazy on the details and only skimmed most of the news stories, especially the really scary ones. I told myself the science was too complicated and that the environmentalists were dealing with it. And I continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong with the shiny card in my wallet attesting to my “elite” frequent flyer status.

A great many of us engage in this kind of climate change denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or we look but then turn it into a joke (“more signs of the Apocalypse!”). Which is another way of looking away. Or we look but tell ourselves comforting stories about how humans are clever and will come up with a technological miracle that will safely suck the carbon out of the skies or magically turn down the heat of the sun. Which, I was to discover while researching this book, is yet another way of looking away.

Or we look but try to be hyper-rational about it (“dollar for dollar it’s more efficient to focus on economic development than climate change, since wealth is the best protection from weather extremes”) – as if having a few more dollars will make much difference when your city is underwater. Or we look but tell ourselves we are too busy to care about something so distant and abstract – even though we saw the water in the subways in New York City during Superstorm Sandy, and the people on their rooftops in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and know that no one is safe, the most vulnerable least of all. And though perfectly understandable, this too is a way of looking away.

Or we look but tell ourselves that all we can do is focus on ourselves. Meditate and shop at farmers’ markets and stop driving – but forget trying to actually change the systems that are making the crisis inevitable because that’s too much “bad energy” and it will never work. And at first it may appear as if we are looking, because many of these lifestyle changes are indeed part of the solution, but we still have one eye tightly shut.

Or maybe we do look – really look – but then, inevitably, we seem to forget. Remember and then forget again. Climate change is like that; it’s hard to keep it in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.

We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything about our world. Major cities will very likely drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas, and there is a very high chance that our children will spend a great deal of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme droughts. And we don’t have to do anything to bring about this future. All we have to do is nothing. Just continue to do what we are doing now, whether it’s counting on a techno-fix or tending to our gardens or telling ourselves we’re unfortunately too busy to deal with it.

All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required.

There are ways of preventing this grim future, or at least making it a lot less dire. But the catch is that these also involve changing everything. For us high consumers, it involves changing how we live, how our economies function, even the stories we tell about our place on earth. The good news is that many of these changes are distinctly uncatastrophic. Many are downright exciting. But I didn’t discover this for a long while.

In 2009, when the financial crisis was in full swing, the massive response from governments around the world showed what was possible when our elites decided to declare a crisis.

We all watched as trillions of dollars were marshaled in a moment. If the banks were allowed to fail, we were told, the rest of the economy would collapse. It was a matter of collective survival, so the money had to be found. In the process, some rather large fictions at the heart of our economic system were exposed (Need more money? Print some!). A few years earlier, governments took a similar approach to public finances after the September 11 terrorist attacks. In many western countries, when it came to constructing the security/surveillance state at home and waging war abroad, budgets never seemed to be an issue.

Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings. The cuts to our greenhouse gas emissions that scientists tell us are necessary in order to greatly reduce the risk of catastrophe are treated as nothing more than gentle suggestions, actions that can be put off pretty much indefinitely. Clearly, what gets declared a crisis is an expression of power and priorities as much as hard facts. But we need not be spectators in all this: politicians aren’t the only ones with the power to declare a crisis. Mass movements of regular people can declare one too.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

In the very same way, if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of what some have called a “Marshall Plan for the Earth,” then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril. We occasionally catch glimpses of this potential when a crisis puts climate change at the front of our minds for a while. “Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed for it will be spent,” declared British prime minister David Cameron – Mr Austerity himself – when large parts of the UK were underwater from historic flooding in February 2014 and the public was enraged that his government was not doing more to help.

I have begun to understand how climate change – if treated as a true planetary emergency akin to those rising flood waters – could become a galvanising force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well. The resources required to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming heavy weather could pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty, providing services now sorely lacking, from clean water to electricity, and on a model that is more democratic and less centralized than the models of the past. This is a vision of the future that goes beyond just surviving or enduring climate change, beyond “mitigating” and “adapting” to it in the grim language of the United Nations. It is a vision in which we collectively use the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now.

Once the lens shifted from one of crisis to possibility, I discovered that I no longer feared immersing myself in the scientific reality of the climate threat. And like many others, I have begun to see all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalysing force for positive change – how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to re-claim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; and to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water. All of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them.

There is a rich populist history of winning big victories for social and economic justice in the midst of large-scale crises. These include, most notably, the policies of the New Deal after the market crash of 1929 and the birth of countless social programs after the second world war. This did not require the kind of authoritarian trickery that I described in my last book, The Shock Doctrine. On the contrary, what was essential was building muscular mass movements capable of standing up to those defending a failing status quo, and that demanded a significantly fairer share of the economic pie for everyone. A few of the lasting (though embattled) legacies of these exceptional historical moments include: public health insurance in many countries, old age pensions, subsidised housing, and public funding for the arts.

I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale. As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels many scientists recommend, we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up.

But before any of these changes can happen – before we can believe that climate change can change us – we first have to stop looking away.

“You have been negotiating all my life.” So said Canadian college student Anjali Appadurai, as she stared down the assembled government negotiators at the 2011 United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa. She was not exaggerating.

The world’s governments have been talking about preventing climate change for more than two decades; they began negotiating the year that Anjali, then 21 years old, was born. And yet as she pointed out in her memorable speech on the convention floor, delivered on behalf of all of the assembled young people: “In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises.” In truth, the intergovernmental body entrusted to prevent “dangerous” levels of climate change has not only failed to make progress over its 20-odd years of work (and almost 100 official negotiation meetings since the agreement was adopted), it has overseen a process of virtually uninterrupted backsliding. Our governments wasted years fudging numbers and squabbling over start dates, perpetually trying to get extensions like undergrads with late term papers.

The catastrophic result of all this obfuscation and procrastination is now undeniable. In 2013, global carbon dioxide emissions were 61% higher than they were in 1990, when negotiations toward a climate treaty began in earnest. Indeed the only thing rising faster than our emissions is the output of words pledging to lower them. Meanwhile, the annual UN climate summit, which remains the best hope for a political breakthrough on climate action, has started to seem less like a forum for serious negotiation than a very costly and high-carbon group therapy session, a place for the representatives of the most vulnerable countries in the world to vent their grief and rage while low-level representatives of the nations largely responsible for their tragedies stare at their shoes.

Though momentum is picking up slightly ahead of December’s critical negotiations in Paris, this has been the mood ever since the collapse of the much-hyped 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen. On the last night of that massive gathering, I found myself with a group of climate justice activists, including one of the most prominent campaigners in Britain.

Throughout the summit, this young man had been the picture of confidence and composure, briefing dozens of journalists a day on what had gone on during each round of negotiations and what the various emission targets meant in the real world. Despite the challenges, his optimism about the summit’s prospects never flagged. Once it was all over, however, and the pitiful deal was done, he fell apart before our eyes. Sitting in an overlit Italian restaurant, he began to sob uncontrollably. “I really thought Obama understood,” he kept repeating.

I have come to think of that night as the climate movement’s coming of age: it was the moment when the realisation truly sank in that no one was coming to save us. The British psychoanalyst and climate specialist Sally Weintrobe describes this as the summit’s “fundamental legacy” – the acute and painful realisation that our “leaders are not looking after us… we are not cared for at the level of our very survival.” No matter how many times we have been disappointed by the failings of our politicians, this realisation still comes as a blow. It really is the case that we are on our own and any credible source of hope in this crisis will have to come from below.

In Copenhagen, the major polluting governments – including the US and China – signed a nonbinding agreement pledging to keep temperatures from increasing more than 2C above where they were before we started powering our economies with coal. This well-known target, which supposedly represents the “safe” limit of climate change, has always been a highly political choice that has more to do with minimising economic disruption than with protecting the greatest number of people. When the two degrees target was made official in Copenhagen, there were impassioned objections from many delegates who said the goal amounted to a “death sentence” for some low-lying island states, as well as for large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact it is a very risky target for all of us: so far, temperatures have increased by just 0.8C and we are already experiencing many alarming impacts, including the unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2012 and the acidification of oceans far more rapidly than expected. Allowing temperatures to warm by more than twice that amount will unquestionably have perilous consequences.

In a 2012 report, the World Bank laid out the gamble implied by that target. “As global warming approaches and exceeds two degrees Celsius, there is a risk of triggering nonlinear tipping elements. Examples include the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet leading to more rapid sea-level rise, or large-scale Amazon dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production, and livelihoods. This would further add to 21st-century global warming and impact entire continents.” In other words, once we allow temperatures to climb past a certain point, where the mercury stops is not in our control.

But the bigger problem – and the reason Copenhagen caused such great despair – is that because governments did not agree to binding targets, they are free to pretty much ignore their commitments. Which is precisely what is happening. Indeed, emissions are rising so rapidly that unless something radical changes within our economic structure, two degrees now looks like a utopian dream. And it’s not just environmentalists who are raising the alarm. The World Bank also warned when it released its report that “we’re on track for a 4C warmer world [by century’s end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” And the report cautioned that, “there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4C world is possible.” Kevin Anderson, former director (now deputy director) of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the UK’s premier climate research institutions, is even blunter; he says 4C warming is “incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable and civilised global community”.

We don’t know exactly what a 4C world would look like, but even the best-case scenario is likely to be calamitous. Four degrees of warming could raise global sea levels by one or possibly even two meters by 2100 (and would lock in at least a few additional meters over future centuries). This would drown some island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to much of California and the northeastern US, as well as huge swaths of South and south-east Asia. Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

Meanwhile, brutal heat waves that can kill tens of thousands of people, even in wealthy countries, would become entirely unremarkable summer events on every continent but Antarctica. The heat would also cause staple crops to suffer dramatic yield losses across the globe (it is possible that Indian wheat and US corn could plummet by as much as 60%), this at a time when demand will be surging due to population growth and a growing demand for meat. When you add ruinous hurricanes, raging wildfires, fisheries collapses, widespread disruptions to water supplies, extinctions, and globe-trotting diseases to the mix, it indeed becomes difficult to imagine that a peaceful, ordered society could be sustained (that is, where such a thing exists in the first place).

Keep in mind that these are the optimistic scenarios in which warming is more or less stabilized at 4C and does not trigger tipping points beyond which runaway warming would occur. And this process may be starting sooner than anyone predicted. In May 2014, Nasa and University of California, Irvine scientists revealed that glacier melt in a section of West Antarctica roughly the size of France now “appears unstoppable”. This likely spells eventual doom for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which according to lead study author Eric Rignot“comes with a sea level rise of between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.” The disintegration, however, could unfold over centuries and there is still time for emission reductions to slow down the process and prevent the worst.

Much more frightening than any of this is the fact that plenty of mainstream analysts think that on our current emissions trajectory, we are headed for even more than four degrees of warming. In 2011, the usually staid International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report projecting that we are actually on track for 6C – 10.8F – of warming. And as the IEA’s chief economist Fatih Birol put it: “Everybody, even the school children, knows that this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.”

These various projections are the equivalent of every alarm in your house going off simultaneously. And then every alarm on your street going off as well, one by one by one. They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species. The only historical precedent for a crisis of this depth and scale was the Cold War fear that we were heading toward nuclear holocaust, which would have made much of the planet uninhabitable. But that was (and remains) a threat; a slim possibility, should geopolitics spiral out of control. The vast majority of nuclear scientists never told us that we were almost certainly going to put our civilisation in peril if we kept going about our daily lives as usual, doing exactly what we were already doing, which is what the climate scientists have been telling us for years.

As the Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie G Thompson, a world-renowned specialist on glacier melt, explained in 2010, “Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilisation.”

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. And yet rather than responding with alarm and doing everything in our power to change course, large parts of humanity are, quite consciously, continuing down the same road. Only, like the passengers aboard Flight 3935, aided by a more powerful, dirtier engine. What is wrong with us?

• Extracted from THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein published this week in paperback by Penguin, £8.99

What the world might look like in 2100, if the temperature rises ...

1°C

Glaciers and Arctic sea ice continue long term declines. Very slow, but irreversible, melting of major ice sheets may begin

2°C

Arctic Ocean likely to be ice free during the summer months

3°C

Polar sheets shed massive volumes of ice causing the sea to rise sharply

4°C

Antarctic ice sheet collapses. Near-completeloss of the Greenland ice sheet causing an eventual sea level rise of up to 7metres

Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Research: Karl Mathiesen