SAN FRANCISCO, 2 November – For thirty-three years the world’s leaders have postponed action despite incontrovertible scientific evidence and images proving that mankind is rapidly razing and scorching our only home.
The upcoming 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) is a hijacked cash-cow. This year, a four-lane highway has carved up tens of thousands of acres of old-growth Amazon Rainforest, NE Brazil, so that 60,000 foreign participants, including world leaders can grandstand.
Hastening the Sixth Mass Extinction, by obliterating Mother Earth, to make more money for housing, feeding, watering, energising, and waste-making people is a flagrant example of new rich, opulence, decadence and profligacy.
Amidst a worsening climate breakdown with accelerating carbon emissions, why is this negotiation not a Zoom conference? Isn’t the COP supposed to set the bar and exemplify lessening carbon expenditures? Undeniably not.
Egregiously, governments and corporations, specifically fossil fuellers, wood pelletisers and palm oilers, the three biggest combustion culprits and event sponsors, will splash oodles of money whilst squandering precious actionable time in Belém, Brazil, later this month’s COP30 jamboree.
For the moment, many thousands of large animals are homeless and hundreds of our brethren and sistren, the animals are road-killed daily along this new subsidised oil-based freeway. By the way, homeless animals die agonisingly.
“Everything was destroyed. I no longer have an income to support my family,” said a distraught local açaí tree berry farmer, Claudio Verequete.
This denuded northern Brazilian Rainforest, along the Amazon River Delta is unnervingly hushed. The earth underfoot crunches because its bonemeal dry. More deforestation begets more drought that begets more Rainforest firestorms.
The unashamed levelling of this irreplaceable weather-making Rainforest Masterpiece, including paving of its exquisite carbon storing wetlands, is indicative of the hypocrisy, greed and leaderlessness gripping the globe.
The Amazon Rainforest is the planet’s largest tropical cornucopia of diverse planetary land life. That woody thrum of activity is the Animal Kingdom’s finest terrestrial complexities. Animals are indispensable mineral, nutrient, and energy circulators, vital for system fitness. Essentially, animals are the scaffolding for colossal carbon-cellar castles (trees) towering over the countryside that make ‘rivers in the sky’ to irrigate agriculture, intercontinentally.
Ruining the Amazon Rainforest that hurries both the climate and extinction crises is an abomination. It contradicts the very rational of a global climate summit, especially since there’s a deepening three-year South American continental-wide drought.
Forewarned
The first COP meeting took place in 1992. That year, the world’s fossil fuels emissions were 4.3 billion metric tons. Governments, corporations and scientists knew that carbon dioxide would skyrocket Earth’s global temperature. Yet, governments refused to break-free from subsidising fossil fuels thereby sidestepping the catastrophic consequences that the world currently faces.
Instead, the world’s governments annually subsidise fossil fuel corporations $7tn, knowing full well that combustion heat is fricasseeing planetary life. For the record, 2024 fossil fuel global emissions were 37.4 billion metric tons, almost nine times higher than 1992 emissions.
The failure to effectively communicate the climate and extinction crises, and devise corrective plans of action, are the greatest fiascos in human history.
My late colleague and grandfather of climate science, professor ‘Wally’ Broecker, famously said, “The climate system is an angry beast and WE are poking at it with a stick.”
Warning after warning, denial after denial, insatiable consumption of almost five planets’ worth of resources fuelled by combusting more carbon in the name of ‘progress’, is in overdrive.
Mankind’s collective hubris and intellectual immaturity have stranded 4.1 billion under 31s. Many are anxious, depressed and obese; some are angry, most (if not all) are addicted to screens, and more and more must endure hunger pangs while others are suicidal.
Realtime: Under the Sea
Mother Earth and her life support systems are showing scientists this:
The oceans drive the planetary climate. They absorb at least 90 per cent of all combustion heat.
Since January 2023, the global sea-surface temperatures have warmed on average by the equivalent of 870,000 Hiroshima bombs worth of combustion heat (fossil fuels, wood pellets, palm oil) per day. Unparalleled.
A deadly ocean fever (4.5C or 8.1F above survivability) has caused the Panamanian fisheries to collapse. Manmade heat has prevented cold water from upwelling and carrying nutrient-rich water to the surface. Hence, the base of the marine life pyramid (phytoplankton, Prochlorococcus) is mostly absent. That entire ecosystem is currently bankrupt.
Terrifyingly, the effects of other ocean fevers are visible worldwide from the sky. The largest planetary photosynthetic surfaces (phytoplankton and Prochlorococcus), accounting for almost three of every four breaths of oxygen, are steadily declining. Across the low to mid-latitudes (450N to 450S) there’s a widespread drop off in ocean greenness. The steepest decline, 1.78 per cent annually (for the previous 23 years), has occurred along the coastlines.
As oceans get hotter and hotter, they are stratifying. Bands of increasing heat ~600 metres beneath the surface are forming a barrier, preventing cold water from rising. That accumulating combustion surface heat is also precluding oceans from storing surface heat in Davy Jones’ lockers.
That surface band of ocean heat is playing hell with Earth’s climate. It’s stoking the atmosphere with more heat. The more heat in the atmosphere, the more moisture it holds. The more moisture it holds, the more extreme the weather events become. A horrible feedback loop that kills people and animals, and destroys communities and habitats.
Burning more fossil fuels, wooden pellets and palm oil are also acidifying and deoxygenating oceans. Shellfish are dissolving. Other marine creatures are facing four-fold dwindling habitats. Colossal curtains of deoxygenated oceans are quickly spreading.
Additionally, the surface area of phytoplankton and Prochlorococcus are diminishing. Consequently, fewer carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed. Mother Earth’s largest carbon conveyor belts are breaking down across the oceans. That’s 71 per cent of Earth’s face.
From the surface to the abyss, ruinous bottom trawling fisheries, ocean floor mining and six-month-long marine ocean floor heatwaves are emptying the ocean floor carbon banks. This scope and scale of land and sea plundering has never occurred in Earth’s history. Appallingly, it’s becoming normalised. World leaders, oligarchs, transnational organised crime and banks are deliberately egging on collapse. Evilness!
Land Liquidation
Burning fossil fuels, wood pellets and palm oil has ratchetted up the planet’s temperature so quickly that Boreal, Temperate and Tropical Forests, Woodlands, Wetlands and Grasslands absorbed almost no carbon in 2023 (and likely similar for 2024, the hottest year ever recorded). The carbon land conveyor belts and warehouses can’t stand the heat.
Less and much thinner reflective polar seasonal sea ice cover, Arctic Tundra releasing methane, increasing continental firestorms, longer, hotter and more frequent heatwaves, long-lasting continental droughts, extreme flooding and plummeting insect populations, are lambasting lifeforms and biomes around the globe. Our ‘beloved’ Mother is facing near-term bankruptcy.
En passant, carbon is Mother Earth’s bank of evolutionary growth. Humans have burned ten million years of fossilised carbon in a few centuries, furiously in the previous 33 years.
So, it’s a no-brainer to terminate fossil fuel subsidies and phase out combustion energy by 2035. What’s more, WE need to junk the Gross Domestic Product. The moment is upon us for a Mother Earth Living Economy with a Contentment Index that measures equality, housing, health and nutrition; the availability of freshwater, clean air, vibrant soils and a smorgasbord of insects; the well-being of Indigenous Peoples and women, along with a hale and hearty Earth System. These are imperative metrics of progress so that young people could live full lives.
Don’t Get Depressed, Get Active!
Allow me to remind YOU that WE outnumber these bastards almost a billion to one. Each of us matters. Together, WE are an unstoppable force for Mother Earth, the animals and their ecosystems, the lifeblood of the planet, its freshwater, the skin of the earth, its soil, the oxygen WE breathe AND the children of Earth.
The single biggest thing that YOU can do, right this moment, is change YOUR behaviour. Switch to a plant-based diet. It’s water-smart, healthy, compassionate and a necessity.
Be kind. Do random acts of selfless goodness. Smile more.
Join direct-action conservation groups and disobedient uprisings to protect native forests, wetlands, grasslands, the oceans and all Earth’s animals.
Eschew consumerism and materialism. Go debt-free. Reconnect with Mother Earth by earthing. Put YOUR bare feet onto our Mother’s soils, rocks, shorelines. Get grounded by regularly feeling Earth’s vibration.
Vote for politicians that protect our planet. Or better still, become an elected official and help devise community future-proofing action plans.
Harness the sun by making a clothes line. Walk more, ride a bicycle more, ride share and use public transit. Become thrifty by mimicking nature.
Plant food-bearing trees. Grow food in a pollinator friendly garden with vermiculture and compost. And share YOUR food with family, friends and neighbours. Communities are only as resilient as the people who actively participate within.
Support local farmer’s markets and local businesses. Consume sparingly.
Spend at least 15 minutes daily next to a BIG tree, disconnected from electronic device(s). Those airborne tree medicines (phytoncides), twelve months of the year, are THE most potent tonic YOU can share with YOUR body. It’s free. While YOU are at it, hug that tree and commit to protecting native forests.
Join non-violent rallies and straighten up proudly for Mother Earth. Or, make a sign and stand on a corner, and let people know that YOU refuse to be silent.
WE must not go quietly into the imminent collapse of civilisation.
Kindness. Kindness. Kindness.
Reese Halter is a bees/trees/seas defender.
Unearthly Wails is a special edition, a collection of poetry
illustrated by renowned Ojibwa artist Terry McCue.
Email: HalterBooks@gmail.com to order
