Volume Three Chapter 2:
Hassan Abbasi
Glasgow Conference November 2021: Deceptive hype, government trickery, camouflage of capital’s environmental bloodbath
The heads of 200 capitalist governments gathered in Glasgow, UK, on November 1, 2021, to spend nearly two weeks, through pompous speeches and the issuance of deceptive posters, spreading the ugliest lies surrounding the decision to combat global warming! deliver to the workers of the world. This time, despite the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, they gathered at the level of presidents, managers, and rulers of capital. Although they were unable to impose any restrictions on capital and were not in the habit of doing so, they bluntly denounced the lies and deceptions of capitalists and governments about supposedly thinking about human environmental issues! They are trying to contain the increase in global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 on the agenda of governments! This is while the same group, in more than a dozen international meetings and conferences, including the largest of them, the Paris Conference in 2015, made speeches that deafened the ears of the workers of the world, and made promises and agreements, none of which were implemented and none of which were intended to be implemented comprehensively. According to an analysis by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in October 2021, the world is on track to warm by 2.7 degrees Celsius. This estimate is also very optimistic. The Earth was already 1.2 degrees warmer than it was in 1880 (Figure 2). Most of this warming has occurred in the last decade. If this trend continues at this rate, it will reach 4 degrees Celsius by 2100. A few degrees of warming may not seem like much, but we are already seeing the devastating and catastrophic effects of even a mere one degree. A two degree increase in global temperatures will become a reality by 2035. First of all, this increase will occur at different rates in different parts of the world. The Arctic will see a 10 degree increase in temperature. Many parts of the Earth will become uninhabitable, which is what we are already seeing in California and parts of East Africa and many other places. The reasons for this are as follows: the amount of carbon dioxide from traffic, factories, deforestation (which could absorb a large amount of carbon dioxide), etc. is increasing every year more than the previous year, and therefore its concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing (Figures 3 and 4). These are real data, while the spokespeople of the capitalist governments in their conferences so far have not yet managed to officially include even a sentence indicating the connection between global warming and fossil fuels. The deceit and trickery of politicians, statesmen, and even some environmental organizations have gone so far as to pretend to convince each other of this, while for a long time, this heinous crime of capital, as well as the increase in capital’s value at the expense of the poverty and misery of workers, has been as clear as day for most of the world’s workers. They do not think about the essential, iron, indissoluble, and inescapable connection between the existence of capitalism and environmental disasters, all genocides, crimes, holocausts, famines, displacements, homelessness, dictatorships, and genocides, and they maintain absolute silence about this organic connection. In these conferences and similar gatherings, as is customary, capital speaks, and its speakers, from Boris Johnson to Biden and all the naked, shameless, and heinous capital managers, state that until now and to this day they have not been aware of the dimensions of the disasters, and that it seems that from now on they are supposed to think of a solution! The deceit of these capital managers has gone so far that they even deny knowing and recognizing the data of the oil giants. The decay, degeneration and anti-humanism of capitalism have reached the height of the galaxies and these days it is not hidden from any worker that it is the cause of all the environmental disasters of capital and wage labour relations. Documents according to which energy industry companies such as Shell, Exxon and BP already knew that there was a link between their products and global warming. About 40 years ago, oil companies like Exxon and Shell made assessments of the carbon dioxide produced by their fossil fuels and the consequences of their emissions for the planet. For example, in 1980, Exxon predicted that by 2060, carbon dioxide levels would reach 560 parts per million (ppm), double the level before the rise and spread of industrial capitalism, and that this would cause the average temperature of the planet to increase by about 2 degrees compared to the pre-industrial capitalist era. Just a few years later, an internal report at Shell predicted the same consequences, but according to the Shell report, reaching this level could happen even earlier, by 2030. These companies had no doubt that there was a link between their products, global warming, and the environmental damage they caused, because their research showed this link. According to Shell’s assessment, global sea levels were predicted to rise by one meter, and global warming could also lead to the loss of the Antarctic ice sheets (which we are currently seeing), leading to a global sea level rise of “five to six meters”. At the Paris conference in 2015, it was said that more than half of the budget allocated for carbon dioxide had been spent to control the increase in global temperatures by more than two degrees. Even if that was a start to reduce the use of fossil fuels, the use of these fuels would have to end by 2030! Otherwise, the 4-degree temperature increase scenario (RPC8.5 scenario) will be a realistic scenario by 2100 ocean acidification, which is the result of nearly 80 percent of carbon dioxide dissolving in the world’s waters and forming carbonic acid in them, is one of these fatal changes. Global warming and rainfall changes are not happening equally in different parts of the world. A 2 or 4 degree increase in average global temperature by 2100 would mean different temperature changes in different parts of the world. And this would lead to the complete disappearance of polar ice caps. Similarly, a terrifying scenario is currently occurring in terms of changes in precipitation on the Earth’s surface. At the poles of the Earth, a higher percentage of rain falls, and at the same time, large parts of the Earth’s surface have become uninhabitable deserts and more deserts. On the other hand, parts of the world, the banks of rivers and seas where hundreds of millions of poor workers live, are being subjected to more violent waves, and the scenario is getting closer to the submersion of these areas and the end of the lives of this huge population, cursed by the hell of capitalism. The working masses living in these areas are now exposed to floods, deadly heat, devastating air and sea disasters, and increasingly severe storms. Conservationists in Australia estimated in January 2020 that as a result of the massive fires (known as mega-blazes) in Australia, an estimated 1.25 billion animals died directly or indirectly as a result of the massive fires in the country. 5.5 million hectares of land, equivalent to the size of the island of Ireland, have been burned, and vast areas of forest in this vast country have now been turned into desert. The Geological and Mineral Exploration Organization of Iran reported in February 2020 that 90 percent of Iran’s plains have “gone out of balance”. The organization described the situation as a “major crisis for the country” and said: “From 2008 to 2014, 150 plains in the country did not have aquifers, and in fact, 10 percent of aquifers are plains in which there is a state of equilibrium”. The organization announced that Iran is currently located in the “world’s dry belt” and warned of increased land subsidence in Iran, saying: “With the decrease in rainfall, we are facing a decrease in water, and this is causing the phenomenon of subsidence, while a number of plains are also drying up, and these will become dust centers”. According to the organization, Iran is a naturally hazardous land, “in such a way that it is said that out of the 43 natural hazards known in the world, 34 of them occur in Iran.” According to the World Meteorological Organization, the twenty warmest years on record have occurred in the last 22 years. In 2019, temperatures were recorded in the Northern Hemisphere about 400 times that were the highest temperatures recorded in history. Temperature records were broken in 29 countries between May 1 and August 30. A third of all these high temperatures were recorded in Germany, followed by France and the Netherlands. In addition to carbon dioxide, methane is also on the rise, increasing its volume in the atmosphere. Methane gas concentrations in parts per billion (ppb) of dry air from data from three global measurement centers between 1984 and 2020. Concentrations of this gas were about 1,850 parts per billion in 2015, at the time of the Paris Agreement, and have increased to about 1,900 parts per billion (ppb) in 2020. The increase from 2019 to 2020 was greater than from 2018 to 2019 and was also higher than the average annual growth rate over the past decade. Nitrous oxide, or nitrous gas, is both a potent greenhouse gas and an ozone deplete, accounting for about 7 percent of long-lived greenhouse gas emissions. The global average net N2O fraction reached 333.2 ppb in 2020, an increase of 1.2 ppb compared to 2019. The annual increase from 2019 to 2020 is greater than the increase from 2018 to 2019 and also higher than the average growth rate over the past 10 years. At climate conferences, it is customary for capital states and their institutions to give medals of honour to some of their strategic allies and to present some governments as the cause of the dire situation. In the Climate Protection Index next year, published by two capital institutions, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom are at the top of the list of countries implementing good environmental policies, respectively! Let’s see how this works in reality. According to the Nature Conservancy, Sweden annually releases as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from areas where its social capital forests are cut down as all the carbon dioxide produced by its cars, and in addition, a large amount of methane is emitted from these areas. In addition, Sweden annually exports a large amount of peat (Torv, a dense brown to black mass of incompletely decomposed mosses and plants. Peat usually forms in very humid areas and in temperate and cold regions of the world and is used as fuel. Peat is the first stage of coal formation, which has a high carbon concentration. In addition to carbon dioxide, this mass also produces methane gas during its evolution) to neighbouring countries such as Finland and Norway and other European countries. In addition, less than 10 percent of Sweden’s natural forests remain, and what is seen as forests is industrial forestry, which uses both chemical fertilizers and dangerous pesticides and hormones such as phenoxyacetic acid. All of these factors have combined to cause a sharp decline in animals, from tiny creatures to birds, rodents, and large forest animals in the country. With the long-standing capitalist forest policy, effectively a system of planting, owning, and harvesting with a very short payback period, instead of the 20 to 30 years or even longer of the more distant past, now the effort is to harvest in one year (I will return to the abysmal state of Swedish forestry at the end of this chapter). New research shows that some of the world’s most protected forests are producing more carbon than they are absorbing, and Sweden’s forests are one of them. These protected forests have become carbon producers because they have been subjected to widespread fires, logging, and cultivation that is different from the forest structure over the past two decades. At least 10 forests listed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, including Yosemite National Park in California, USA, have become carbon producers over the past two decades. Official data shows that deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon has reached its highest rate in more than 15 years. A report by the Brazilian Space Agency (INPE) in November 2021 showed that the intensity of deforestation has increased by 22 percent in the past year. According to the latest data, about 13,235 square kilometres of these forests were destroyed in the period 2020-2021, the highest figure since 2006.
Figure 2 is 1.18 degrees, taking into account the difference between 1.02 degrees (2020) and -0.16 degrees (1880). The past ten years have been the warmest in recorded human history
Figure 3 shows the steady increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (parts per million ppm) observed at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii over a 60-year period.
Greenhouse gas measurements began in 1959. Source: NOAA. Data is up to March 2019, while 2020 data show a concentration of 413.3 parts per million (ppm) in the Earth’s atmosphere. In 2013, the concentration of this gas was 396 ppm, just 4 ppm below the threshold that the IPCC considers a turning point in the history of this gas increase in that year (a 141 percent increase compared to the pre-capitalist period). It is noteworthy that the concentration of this gas, which is considered to maintain the extent of its destruction, including a 2-degree increase in global warming, is 450 ppm in the atmosphere in 2100. Now, in the first half of 2022, the concentration of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, has reached 421 parts per million, higher than at any time in human history. The figure of 417 parts per million was recorded in October 2021, and less than a year has passed since then, when the figure of 421 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is reached! This means that the faster the increase of this gas, along with the staggering increase in the production and consumption of raw materials by capital, the more astronomical the need for capital accumulation. The characteristic of capital production and the relentless need for accumulation is despite the crippling crises of capital, the increasing poverty and misery of the working masses, war, the displacement of hundreds of millions of hungry and homeless workers. Capitalist governments are full of boasting about the progress and development of capital, the creation of new areas of production such as wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, etc., and this is only the result of its gigantic development! The increase in greenhouse gases, the endless environmental disasters for humanity, are an excuse to increase profit and capital production in new ways. These were never intended and cannot be a path to the happiness of working humanity. The owners of capital use all the disasters they bring upon humanity in these conferences and gatherings as an excuse and a pretext to open up new areas of capital advance, and as is the nature and purpose of capitalist production, they all call their search for greater and more golden profits “serving” humanity! They talk about the challenge of the destructive effects of industrial production and their replacement with ecological products!! While in practice, as can be seen from the figures expressed in these writings, never and in no case during the life of capitalism have they taken a step towards the health, treatment, and environmental protection of humans and animals. When the conversion of agricultural land, mines, seas, lakes, oil and gas resources, air, wind, and sunlight into capital by exploiting the quasi-free labour of five and a half billion workers in the world is the daily business of capitalism and the need of the moment, the moment of survival of this system, the discussion of ignoring the added values of new areas of capital advance is pure demagogy, like all the words and claims of other capitalists. The production and supply of goods under the titles of environmental, recycled, sustainable development, etc. is an effort by manufacturers and government agencies to make it seem as if the capitalists of this or that field of production care about the quality of goods and the health of humans and consumers! Is this really the case? Is there a goal outside the scope of advertising and deception other than making as much profit as possible? Commodity production, and its most advanced form, capitalist production, is the origin, driver, and full-spectrum mirror of the fetishist role of the product of human labour. The very replacement of the relationship between humans with the relationship between objects and commodities implies that commodities or capital become everything and humans become nothing. Under the rule of capital, the worker, his environment, the earth, air, water and space, as far as the needs of human life are concerned, are in the process of becoming nothing, and instead it is capital that accelerates the dynamic of playing its divine role to the limit. Commodity fetishism is the inevitable result of the separation of man from work and the product of work. As I will show in the following writings, the development of metals known and new to the astronomical increase in the production of new types of goods from the layers of the earth is not an exception to the above rule, and for this reason, it has no goal other than profit and the production of as much capital as possible from each unit invested, and is entirely capital-oriented and anti-human, and by the very nature of capitalist production relations, it will have no other result than what we have witnessed so far. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on May 18, 2022, that the world’s oceans reached their highest temperatures and acidity on record in 2021, with their levels reaching record highs due to melting polar ice caps. “Earth’s climate is changing before our eyes,” said Petteri Talas, the WMO’s secretary-general, in a statement. The WMO says that in 2021, the amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere was higher than at any time during the industrial era. Last year’s weather was slightly milder than 2020 due to a phenomenon known as La Niña, but it was still among the seven hottest years on record. “Sooner or later, we will break another record for annual heat,” Mr. Talas said. The oceans are the most important sinks of warming and emissions. They have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat accumulated in the atmosphere over the past 170 years and 23 percent of the carbon dioxide produced by capital. The report says the oceans have warmed significantly over the past 20 years, reaching a record high in 2021, a trend that is expected to continue. The change is likely to be irreversible for hundreds or thousands of years, according to the WMO. The oceans are also the most acidic they have been in 26,000 years due to the absorption of carbon dioxide. Sea levels have risen by 4.5 centimeters in the past decade, with the annual rate of sea level rise from 2013 to 2021 more than double that from 1993 to 2002. The WMO also compiled a list of heat waves, wildfires, floods and other climate disasters around the world. Experts attribute this year’s bad weather to the “La Niña” weather phenomenon, which originates in the Pacific Ocean and can affect all regions of the world. Floods have many causes, but a warming of the Earth’s atmosphere due to climate change has made extremely heavy rainfall more likely. In the last months of 2022, severe heat waves have affected the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people in northern India. Parts of the country have experienced five heat waves since mid-March, including one in mid-May when temperatures in parts of Delhi reached 49.2 degrees Celsius. Reports suggest that the unseasonably warm temperatures have reduced wheat production and also increased demand for electricity, leading to power outages in many states. The average maximum temperature in March was the highest in 122 years. Summers are always a tough season in many parts of India, especially in the northern and central regions where huge masses of workers struggle to make ends meet. According to the World Meteorological Organization, last year the US witnessed its hottest summer on record, with hundreds of people dying in heat-related incidents. In 2021, the Dixie Fire burned 3,900 square kilometres’, making it the largest wildfire in California’s history. The consequences of warming are, for example, in the United States. Lake Mead on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, is the largest reservoir in the United States, supplying water to 25 million people in three US states and Mexico, generating energy and meeting the water needs of industrial capital, agriculture and livestock. Here are the staggering dimensions of the drought in the American West. Water experts warn of a more worrying consequence: that if the dam continues to fall, it risks becoming a “dead basin” – a level at which the Hoover Dam can no longer generate electricity or deliver water. As a severe drought on the US West Coast is expected to worsen during the hot summer months, Californians are being told to conserve water at home or face mandatory restrictions. People are being advised to reduce their water use in their yards and take shorter showers. In Los Angeles, many residents are being asked to cut their water usage by 35 percent. The restrictions come after California experienced its driest start to a water year on record. Things are already tough for industrial agriculture. About 75 percent of Lake Mead’s water is used for industrial agriculture. Huge investments in this sector of the US produce more than a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts in California. But tens of thousands of acres of land lie fallow because industrial agriculture doesn’t have enough water to grow crops. NASA, the US space agency that monitors changing water levels, warns that the American West is now entering one of the most severe droughts in its history. “With climate change, it seems like the dominoes are starting to fall,” says J.T. Rieger, a NASA hydrologist. “It’s getting warmer here, and there’s less rain and less snow. The dams are drying up, so in a place like the American West, you’re going to have more fires.” Mr. Rieger said the consequences are “getting worse”: “It’s like we’re watching a disaster unfold in slow motion.” For many people living in the heart of California’s agricultural belt, wells are already starting to dry up, increasing the cost of drilling deeper wells. “It’s scary because we don’t know if we’re going to have water in a month or two.” In many areas, wells are still working, but their water is contaminated with chemicals used in agriculture and is unfit for human consumption. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reached this level 4.1 million years ago, when the Arctic was covered in forest and humans had not yet evolved. According to U.S. government data, carbon dioxide concentrations have reached 421 parts per million (ppm), more than one and a half times higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. These high levels of carbon dioxide indicate that planet Earth is entering an unpredictable state—one that existed long before humans first set foot on it. The only time carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been this high was 4.1 million years ago, when they reached about 400 ppm. It’s called the Pliocene epoch, and the world was very different from ours today. The Arctic was covered in forests, and sea levels were five to 25 meters higher than they are today. Volcanic activity was very high. However, the number of plants that had the power to purify and absorb carbon dioxide was very high. The UN Climate Change Conference is currently taking place in Bonn, Germany, and will last until June 16, 2022. The conference is supposed to pave the way for practical solutions to be achieved and implemented at the upcoming UN Climate Conference (COP26) in Egypt. Although scientists from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have repeatedly said that to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 45% by 2030!! The Big Island of Hawaii Meteorological Center measured a concentration of 421 ppm in May of this year (2022). Before the start of industrial capitalism, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 280 ppm. This concentration remained constant for about six thousand years, providing the conditions for the advancement and expansion of human civilization. Since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has released about 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which could warm the planet for hundreds or thousands of years to come. The beginning of industrial capitalism and the invention of the steam engine, the increased consumption of coal and oil with the aim of increasing labour productivity, were the beginning of the staggering production of greenhouse gases and the creation of environmental pollution. Leading capitalist countries have been at the forefront of the extraction and appropriation of natural resources and their capital consumption since the Industrial Revolution and capital in general.
Chart 4: Amount of carbon dioxide emitted and absorbed in the Earth’s atmosphere in the last two and a half decades In addition to carbon dioxide, methane gas is also on an upward trend and its volume in space is increasing. In 2019 and 2022, the amount of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere was as shown in the following chart:
Chart 5 a
Chart 5 b
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Overview, by Type of Gas: 2022
The Chart 5 shows the 5% of each of the major greenhouse gases that have a significant impact on global warming in the years 2019 (chart 5a) and 2022 (chart 5b). We will explain each of them in terms of quantity and concentration over time. The Glasgow conference, like other gatherings of capital managers, does not address any of these gases and pretends that the majority of the world’s population has no problems other than a certain amount of carbon dioxide, which will be solved by the wisdom of capital managers and government officials!
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
As can be seen from Figure 5, the percentage of these greenhouse gases has not changed in these years, as it has in the past (see the first volume of this series).
Regarding the increase in carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere as a parameter for measuring other greenhouse gases, you can refer to the following site, which has measured the amount of this gas until February 2026. The increase in this gas has never stopped or decreased during the period of industrial capitalism, that is, since 1850. According to the graph below, the concentration of this gas reached 429 ppm by the mentioned date (February 2026). Data source: NOAA, measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/carbon-dioxide/
Figure 6: Methane concentrations in parts per billion (ppb) of dry air from three global measurement sites between 1750 and 2025. The concentration of this gas was about 1,850 ppb in 2015, at the time of the Paris Agreement, and has increased to about 1,900 ppb in 2020 and to 1,946 ppb in November 2025. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for about a decade. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), methane accounts for about 16 percent of the long-term warming effect of greenhouse gases. Approximately 40 percent of methane is emitted to the atmosphere by natural sources (e.g., wetlands, deforested areas, and Siberian tundra melting due to warming), and about 60 percent is supplied by capital sources (e.g., ruminants, rice farming, fossil fuel exploitation, landfills, and biomass burning). This increase from 2019 to 2020 was greater than from 2018 to 2019 and was also higher than the average annual growth rate over the past decade, and this trend will increase in the third decade of this century, as Figure 6 shows.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/methane/
Figure 7 shows the concentration of nitrous gas during the growth of capital accumulation.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nitrous-oxide-long
Nitrous oxide (N2O) is both a potent greenhouse gas and a chemical that destroys the ozone layer in the Earth’s atmosphere, which protects humans and many other living things from the sun’s ultraviolet light, which is a form of electromagnetic radiation. It accounts for about 7 percent of the long-lived greenhouse gas emissions. N2O is released into the atmosphere from natural, agricultural, and industrial sources, including oceans, soils, biomass burning, fertilizer use, and various industrial processes, such as oil and gas and petrochemicals. The global average net N2O fraction reached 333.2 ppb in 2020, an increase of 1.2 ppb from 2019, and is expected to reach 336 ppb in 2022 and increased to 338 ppb in 2024, according to NASA data. The annual increase from 2019 to 2020 was greater than the increase from 2018 to 2019 and also higher than the average growth rate over the past 10 years (0.99 ppb per year). Global N2O emissions from capitalist industrial agriculture, which is driven by the addition of nitrogen to cropland, have increased by 30% over the past four decades. Industrial agriculture, due to the use of nitrogen fertilizers and animal manure, accounts for 70% of total N2O emissions. This increase has been largely driven by the growth in atmospheric N2O. Nitrous oxide concentrations in 2015 were about 327 parts per billion and have increased by 1 ppb each year since then. Nitrous oxide is 310 times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, making it a major contributor to global warming. Its contribution to global warming is estimated to be between 4 and 6 percent. Now, if we consider these three greenhouse gases in terms of their thermal effect on each other and add the units of methane and nitrous oxide based on the effect of carbon dioxide on increasing global warming, a concentration of 426 (ppm) is obtained in 2024 and more than 430 ppm in 2025. It should be noted that water vapor, which makes up about 75% of the Earth’s atmosphere, also has a thermal effect of between 36 and 70% among greenhouse gases. Methane is a gas that, after carbon dioxide, is the most important factor in increasing global temperatures. It should be noted that water vapor, which makes up about 75% of the Earth’s atmosphere, also has a thermal effect of between 36 and 70% of greenhouse gases. Methane is a gas that, after carbon dioxide, is the most important factor in increasing the Earth’s temperature. The amount of this gas in the Earth’s atmosphere has more than doubled since the beginning of industrial capitalism (1850), and its effect on increasing the Earth’s temperature among all greenhouse gases is about 20%. Methane gas can absorb 23 times more heat than carbon dioxide, but its lifetime in the Earth’s atmosphere is about 10-15 years. The amount of this gas’s effect on global warming is between 4-9 percent. In addition to these three important greenhouse gases, other gases are also added to their annual amount in the Earth’s atmosphere, which we have not included in these calculations because of their lesser importance. Gases such as ozone, whose negative effect is through the absorption of ultraviolet light by the Earth, which increases the Earth’s temperature by 3 to 6 percent in this passage. Other greenhouse gases that are sent to the Earth’s atmosphere from factories, production processes, and cold storage are fluorine compounds. Their amount is small (1.5 percent) but they have a very destructive effect. Fluorinated gases do not exist naturally, and modern capitalist industry has produced them. These gases absorb the heat emitted by the earth 22,000 times more effectively than carbon dioxide. In addition, they are very stable and can remain in the earth’s atmosphere for thousands of years. Their factors and centers of sublimation are: HFCs in refrigerators, air conditioners and cold rooms, SF6 in the electronics industry, PFCs in aluminium production and the electronics industry, CFCs in refrigerators and air conditioners. Now let’s return to the main source of carbon dioxide production, which has become so controversial and which the representatives, managers and capitalist governments in this conference are especially pointing the finger of accusation at each other as the main culprit. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pretends to be the greatest environmentalist and is thinking about solutions in this area day and night. He forgets, and certainly intentionally forgets, that the British Prime Minister of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, sent several thousand mine workers into a hell of poverty and unemployment due to the high cost of coal mining and the nearing end of one of the worst fossil fuels. This was not because of her love of nature, but because the economic interests and profits of Britain’s social capital required her to do this. In addition to the fact that Britain was the first country to produce coal, oil and gas in the world, capital was Thatcher’s turn towards BP. Therefore, British capitalism thinks that the memory of the workers of the world is short, and they have forgotten that for more than a hundred years this empire has been the greatest destroyer of the environment of humans and all of nature and still is. The crocodile tears of German Chancellor Merkel, Biden, Putin, Macron, etc. are also shed. German capitalism has been a producer and consumer of the worst types of fossil fuels for over a century and is still a major importer of Russian gas through the Stream 1 and 2 projects. The Chinese president sees the competition with American capitalism over increasing greenhouse gases as a contribution of China, which entered the arena of capitalist development later, and has another 40 or 50 years to reach the level of the British and American empires in this field. The same reasons are listed by other large capitalist countries such as India, Australia and Brazil. The basis of what has been called “environmental justice” for some time is also the bargaining of different social capitals over the share of surplus value produced by the global working class and the reduction of capital costs. There is no justice between workers and capitalists. Although the factions of the bourgeoisie disagree over the share of surplus value and participation in the governance of the system, they are united in the exploitation and exploitation of workers, and this is the basis of the rights and justice of capitalist production relations. The category of “justice” in capitalist society is as unreal and false as the claim that capital buys “labour”. This category is as fake as the capitalist class’s interpretation of freedom, justice, humanity, equality and all legal, moral and human concepts is fake. The foundation of capital’s existence is based on the exploitation of labour, and capital’s view of the world, society, man and all phenomena of human life originate from the depths of the interests and conditions of reproduction of this exploitation of labour. There is no real common justice between capitalist and worker, this is a false category that the capitalist class has created to use as a powerful weapon against the working class and its anti-capitalist movement.
Chart 8 Average daily oil production in the world over the last two and a half decades. As long as there are vast reserves of oil in the world at low production costs, capitals thirst for raw material is insatiable. The slight drop in oil production in 2020 was entirely temporary, and now capital’s greed has caused the price of this essential commodity to rise daily. For this reason, according to estimates, carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere in 2020 decreased by 4% compared to 2019 (the largest annual decrease since the Second Imperialist War), thus returning to 35.33 billion tons, i.e. around 2017. But these declines quickly gave way to increases that not only compensated for the temporary decline but also fuelled capital’s insatiable thirst for ever-increasing accumulation. This has been due to the halt or reduction of many productions, the reduction of transport and all transportation due to Covid-19, and the reduction of capital consumption of oil and gas. This is once again evidence of the halt in the production of these raw materials and many other goods as the only solution to environmental destruction and has no other meaning than the halt in capitalist production, the abolition of wage labour by anti-capitalist workers’ councils. The Production Gap report, first presented in 2019, tracks the gap between capitalist governments’ fossil fuel production plans and global production levels consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. UNEP researchers provide insights from their experience with other production gap reports. They say governments are aiming to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5°C. The production gap has remained largely unchanged since our first analysis in 2019, and two years later, as the climate crisis becomes clearer and more urgent, capitalist governments are continuing to extract more coal, oil and gas. The vast majority of major oil and gas producers are planning to increase production by 2030 or beyond, and several major coal producers are planning to continue or increase production as they anticipate that global capital demand for energy and fossil fuels, which are much cheaper than other energy sources, will increase. G20 countries have allocated more financial aid to fossil fuels than to clean energy since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Figure 9 Fossil fuel production gap – the difference between global fossil fuel production projected by government plans (red line) and that consistent with warming pathways of 1.5°C and 2°C (blue and green lines). Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions released when fossil fuels are burned remain high.
Figure 10 shows two different things: the bluffing of capital governments and their actions. Government planning as a whole suggests an increase in global oil and gas production and only a slight decrease in coal production over the next two decades. This would lead to future production levels far higher than those agreed upon at the 2015 Paris conference by the same governments, who agreed to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. During the same period between 2015 and 2021, the charlatanism of capitalist governments was visible like a rooster’s tail through a fox’s cloak. The scales of this diagram are displayed in four directions from 2019 to 2040, with physical units displayed as secondary axes: billion tons per year (Gt/year) for coal, million barrels per day (Mb/d) for oil, and trillion cubic meters per year (Tcm/year) for gas. This is while the major producers and consumers of coal announced on the eve of the Glasgow conference that they do not intend to abandon the production and capital consumption of this dirtiest and most destructive energy raw material, which has been produced and consumed for nearly 170 years. The Chinese capital government announced that it would continue this trend until at least 2060, and the Indian capital government also went even further and set 2070 as the minimum coal extraction and capital consumption year. At the same time, the Australian capital government, the world’s largest coal producer, did not announce any date for the cessation of coal production, and the conference of heads of state of 200 countries was completely silent!! Therefore, the estimates of the capital institutes specified in graphs 9 and 10 by 2040 must be more than this, and the scenario of 4 degrees of global warming compared to the period of industrial capitalist development is real. They were not supposed to have any words or actions to change the catastrophic state of our lives. Their words, or those of any capitalist or statesman, are not a lack of awareness of the dire state of environmental disasters, which is another fundamental issue. The heart’s message or the conscience’s message emanating from the social existence of all capitalists and their governments is that not only is capital the qibla of the world, the provider of sustenance, the source of life, the guarantor of life, the key to human life, but also the solution to the problems it has created itself, is this hellish system, its governments, its colourful institutes, and their annual meetings. And we workers, if we want life, if we expect a clean-living environment, if we even seek for our evening meal, shelter, a future for our children, we must think about getting rid of being workers. We must lay the foundation of the struggle. We do not want to be workers, we do not want to be producers of surplus value, we want to dominate the fate of our work, production and life. We must stomp our feet and stop the wheel of production of everything that endangers our lives and has become a scourge for our souls!! As long as we are silent and as long as the prospect of our strikes, protests and riots is higher wages, as long as we demand a life free from pollutants from capital and we pin our hopes on the meetings, parliaments and the hubbub of capitalists, capital’s response to us is the same as it has been so far and will become even more disastrous.
Now let’s return to the topic that began at these conferences with the distribution of “medals of honour” to some capital governments and the spitting and cursing of others.
In the climate protection index for next year, published by two institutions (German Watch and New or New Climate), Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom are respectively at the top of the list of countries that implement good environmental policy!! Let’s see how this is in reality. Meanwhile, according to a report by the Nature Conservation Agency, Sweden annually emits the same amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from areas where forest trees are cut down by its social capital forest area as all the carbon dioxide produced by the country’s small and private cars (about 5 million private cars), and in addition, a large amount of methane gas is emitted from these areas. And that’s about 13 percent of the country’s total annual carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, Sweden annually produces a large amount of peat (a dense brown to black mass of incompletely decomposed mosses and plants, Torv). Coal (Torv) is usually formed in very humid lands and in temperate and cold regions of the world and is used as fuel. Coal is the first stage of coal formation, which has a high carbon concentration. In its evolution, this mass produces methane gas in addition to carbon dioxide, which it exports to neighbouring countries such as Finland and Norway and other European countries. Despite the fact that new peat formation occurs much faster than fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, it has large amounts of stored carbon in many areas. Over a time, horizon of up to a few hundred years, studies show that greenhouse gas emissions from peat are comparable to fossil gas emissions. Therefore, the combustion of peat (peat) gives off net emissions of carbon dioxide, unlike other fossil fuels. The classification of peat differs between the Swedish electricity generation system, the European Union’s carbon emissions trading system and the international climate negotiations at the United Nations. Both in Sweden and the UN Climate Panel, peat is classified as a fossil fuel. However, in Swedish law it is included among renewable energy sources. According to the Swedish Energy Agency, peat coal falls under the category of “other fuels” and is exempt from energy and carbon taxes. Sweden, Finland and Ireland have the highest percentages of their annual energy from peat in the world. Finland has 7%, Ireland has 5% and Sweden has 0.7%, but let’s not forget that Sweden supplies a large amount of the peat needed by Finland, Norway and the Netherlands. Between 2019 and 2020, Sweden’s cultivated peat output increased by 19.7 percent, from 1.6 to 1.9 million cubic meters. This is the highest measured amount for cultivated peat since measurements began. There is increasing demand, especially abroad, where cultivated peat exports increased by 13 percent over the same period. While Sweden has no other fossil fuel resources, its energy and forestry industries enjoy high levels of labour productivity, which puts the country’s share of social capital profits above the world average. The use of various pesticides in forestry has a long history. Before the Swedish forestry sector entered a phase of widespread use and advanced industrial exploitation in this field, around the late 1800s, workers of these companies used saws and axes in groups of several hundred people to cut down huge trees in the forests because the capitalists of this capital-intensive sector knew well that sturdy and old trees contained high-quality fibres for carpentry, wooden construction, pulp production, etc. Simultaneously with the first automobiles, vehicles capable of greatly increasing labour productivity in difficult forest areas appeared. During the Second Imperialist War, the need for European capital for wood, charcoal, and their products increased astronomically. It was here that mass production of forest products was the solution, and the forest itself presented obstacles to the development of techniques for felling trees, transporting them to factories, and even planting new seedlings. One of these obstacles was the uncontrolled and unregulated growth of deciduous plants, shrubs, and whole plants that did not require capital investment in the manner of the capitalistic forestry sector. The first thing that comes to mind for today’s forest people at the mention of the word pesticide is the controversial herbicide, phenoxy acids, against deciduous plants, or the insecticide, DDT, against insects. However, the use of pesticides began much earlier, in the late 1940s, and had a purpose not entirely different, but in a different sphere of capital. It should be noted that large-scale use only came about when large-scale forestry companies in Norrland (northern Sweden) began serious restoration work to remove vegetation with chlorate solutions in the early 1950s. Further tests were carried out on other biocides. Continued trials were carried out in other locations in Sweden over the next few years with satisfactory results from the point of view of the Swedish Agricultural and Forestry Institutes. As early as 1944, attempts were made to prevent the formation of dead branches in birch with various chemicals such as sodium arsenate, sodium chlorate and sodium pentachlorophenol (all of which are extremely dangerous to humans and animals). Experiments began in 1948 with hormone derivatives such as (2,3,7,8-Tetraklordibenzo-p-dioxin – TCDD) and
(-methyl-4-chlorophenoxyacetic acid (MCPA)) and) *(polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)) then primarily phenoxy acids. Since the early 1950s, they have been successfully used to control weeds in agriculture, and thus, with the silence of the capitalist workers, this field has taken a more aggressive step against nature. The advantage of hormonal derivatives is their selectivity, that is, different derivatives affect different species. Its derivatives are similar to dioxins, growth hormones, meaning that they attack the short plant and die when exposed to the hormone derivatives. Or some others specifically target and dry out deciduous trees, not pines. The most potent phenoxy acids were selected and this process continued until 1977, when most of the forests used in this capital reserve area were mainly pine forests. The need to control deciduous plants (birch species, such as birch, alder, beech and oak. Most birch species are small to medium-sized trees with short lifespans and are native to the temperate and subarctic parts of the Northern Hemisphere) was the main focus of this capital reserve area. he Forest Owners and Forestry Companies Organization explains this period in its history as follows: “The labour force used to uproot and cut down trees and deciduous shrubs was very large, and its high cost made forestry uneconomical.” The demand for a cheaper solution to the problems of what was called “forest rejuvenation” led to aerial spraying experiments conducted near Kramfors in 1950. The experiment was carried out with three different preparations in three different concentrations from a helicopter, and the results exceeded expectations. “Airborne spraying trials began the following year, and the good results continued.” Large forestry companies were now taking a serious interest in this type of control of deciduous trees and so-called “weeds,” and the public reaction was not long in coming. The masses gave headlines such as “Birch killing in Dalarna,” “Flying causes hormonal death.” Mass protests against the clearing of forests of deciduous plants gradually grew, leading to large gatherings in the forested areas of upper Sweden, with environmental activists and the public from Torsby, Fallon and Gävle, among others, strongly opposing aerial spraying. They followed the spraying plan from the ground, maintained radio contact during reconnaissance, and found airfields and runways camouflaged in the forest, where they chained themselves to trees in protest in 1976. Government officials and forestry companies unanimously said it was profitable and not dangerous. The Thorsby Conservation Group took on the task, becoming the forerunner of the modern environmental movement. The generally working-class Thorsby crowd began collecting testimonies from the people of the area for the “cancer report”. The 25 pages are fully written about how it is to live in the vicinity of the sprayed areas and work with the poison. There is evidence of dead animals and people who have become ill. The hatred for using such a method grew. When the time came for the Environmental Days in Torsby in June 1977, the Working Mass Movement for the Environment, together with some writers, theatre actors and what in Sweden are known as cultural workers (kultur arbetare) from Stockholm and Uppsala, began to grow under the slogan Save the Forest and experienced successful days. 6,000 people in a community of 3,500 people demonstrated, lectured and staged. This was the peak of the workers’ movements against the disasters of capital on the environment, and the situation was similar throughout Europe for several years. However, these protests never turned into a social-class movement, and the working masses of Sweden, nor any other country, entered the process of struggle against capital and the disasters it created. Nowhere in the hell of capital did workers stop working for their environment and the future of their children, and never did the process of capital accumulation threaten capitalist states. On the sidelines of this Glasgow conference, young working-class families, numbering in the tens of thousands, staged protests in Glasgow, London, Paris, and other European cities, but nowhere did this turn into a mass workers’ movement against the capitalist foundation, and as Greta Thunberg called it on Friday, November 12 (the last official day of COP26), it was a “two-week festival for ‘business as usual” ! They were practically the stage managers, planners and all-rounders of the capitalists, their governments and the relevant institutions. Once again, capital sent a message to the workers of the world that the master of the earth and time, the provider, the determiner of the present and future of humanity, is not only a destroyer of the environment, nature, and the loser of its fellow living beings, but also a planner and stage manager of occasional shows, and this will continue to be the case until the workers have completely surrendered themselves to him. Let us return to the environmental conditions of Sweden, which are an example of a glutton.
For about two decades, this investment bank in Sweden has been using new pesticides in a different way because most of the forests have been cleared of deciduous plants and consist of pine, are very dense, and the only roads needed to cut down trees and transport timber cut through the thickets. The phenoxyacetic acid harvesters used in this field are similar to those used in industrial farming, but they are much more advanced and there are various capabilities in the same combine that not only cut trees, debark, cut timber, and load them onto trailers with three carriers, but today a new generation of these combines has entered the production field, which in addition to the above tasks have 8 legs like a crab. All four legs on the sides of the field furrow, the next turn they plant and fertilize. In this way, they use very little labour with very high productivity.
Demand for forest products is increasing in order to meet the growing demand for forest products, the forest industry continues to harvest from our natural forests, i.e. forests that have been allowed to grow naturally and have never been cleared or planted. Today, only 10 percent of Sweden’s forests are natural forests. This is a disaster for the forest. Not for each tree, of course, but for the forest as an ecosystem, says Sebastian Kripo. He is a forest biologist and fights for the protection of more forests in Sweden. “A timber farm is not a forest” A planted forest is a wooded area. In the forest, various animals, from tiny creatures to large animals, all kinds of plants make up an ecosystem. He says that this is not a forest and can never replace natural forests. The forest industry wants to replace fossil products with biological forest products, which increases the pressure on the forest. We cannot call these trees a forest, this is a timber plantation. A functioning natural ecosystem can never be replaced by planted trees. The habitat of animals and plants is being drastically reduced. Many birds are disappearing because their habitat is being destroyed, the small organisms, plants and seeds they feed on are being destroyed and our new generation does not recognize the sounds and songs of birds! Forest biologist Sebastian Krepo, who is now involved in forest conservation, says that this threatens the biodiversity in the forest. Due to the low average age in Swedish forests, a large part of the harvested timber is found in the few remaining unprotected natural forests. The forestry industry wants to invest in faster-growing trees that can be cut down sooner. They are trying to speed up natural processes. It’s a bit like anabolic steroids, where you have to speed up muscle growth for a while instead of training properly to have strong muscle that works and is durable. “We are creating a kind of living environment that is doping,” says Sebastian Krepo. The pulp and paper industry in Sweden is enormous. The mass production of Sweden’s forests today is not enough to feed all the pulp and paper factories, let alone to produce materials that compete with fossil fuels. The extract, which is produced by distilling and boiling forest plants to offset fossil fuels, produces only carbon dioxide and water when used in cars! This is not a compensator or renewable fuel in any way! Although the Swedish capital government and the Swedish Forest Industries Association defend themselves by claiming that they produce wood products that save the climate. However, a study by the International Renewable Energy Agency shows that of every tree sawn, only 10 percent is converted into wood products, while most is converted into paper, pulp and energy.
The World Meteorological Organization has warned of the consequences of climate change for energy security. A new report from the organization states that extreme weather conditions are putting power plants and infrastructure at risk. The World Meteorological Organization warned in its annual report, released on October 11, 2022, ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, that climate change threatens the world. The organization says heat waves and droughts are reducing the water needed to run hydroelectric power or cool nuclear power plants. In addition, hurricanes and other extreme weather events are putting infrastructure at risk in many parts of the world. According to the report, a third of combined heat and power plants that require cooling water to operate are in areas facing severe water shortages. This is currently the case for 15% of the world’s nuclear power plants, and is likely to rise to 25% in the next 20 years. Heat waves and water shortages are also posing problems for hydroelectric power plants. Rising sea levels and storms are also putting power plants near the coast at risk. At the same time, the energy sector is also contributing to climate change, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Accordingly, electricity generation from renewable sources must double within eight years to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. For example, Africa has more than 60 percent of the world’s best solar energy resources. However, only one percent of photovoltaic capacity is currently installed on the continent. Photovoltaics are systems that can directly convert solar energy into electricity. The World Meteorological Organization says funding to help countries transition to clean energy has fallen since 2018, from $14.2 billion to $10.9 billion the following year. An annual investment of $25 billion is needed to install clean energy everywhere in Africa. The World Meteorological Organization said in May 2022 that the world’s oceans reached their highest temperature and acidity on record in 2021, with their levels reaching record highs due to melting polar ice caps. This comes as COP26, the climate change conference held in Glasgow from October 31 to November 12, 2021, hosted by the United Kingdom. The main goal was to propose programs to prevent global warming!! The main reason for the decrease in investment in solar energy in areas where the efficiency of using the amount and intensity of solar radiation is high, for example in Africa, is firstly the cheapness of producing and transmitting energy from conventional (fossil) fuels, which after 2020 has become more affordable than before with the growth of oil and gas production and especially the influx of huge capital from China, India and Australia into coal. For example, according to a plan presented by Xi Jinping to the Communist Party Congress in October, carbon dioxide emissions will increase every year until 2030, reaching what is called the peak of carbon dioxide emissions. Only then will they reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At the COP26 conference, China also set the end of coal consumption for China’s social capital as 2070. Chinese officials have said that annual coal output will increase to 4.6 billion tons in 2025. And that means 12 percent more than in 2021. Xi also said in a 2020 speech to the United Nations that China’s greenhouse gas emissions should peak in 2030 but did not specify what level it would reach. A significant part of the renewable energy production system relies on subsidies and tax cuts for capital-owning producers in these areas and increased taxes and levies on the consumer masses. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), released on 27 October 2022 ahead of the COP27 conference (6-18 November), shows the world on track to reach an average of 2.8 degrees Celsius.
Things are going badly for many of the world’s wild animals. The number of animal species has declined by almost 70 percent in the past 50 years, according to a new report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). The situation is worst in tropical countries. Researchers from the Zoological Society of London, in conjunction with the Living Planet 2022 report, have surveyed almost 32,000 wild populations of vertebrates around the world. That’s almost 11,000 more species than previous surveys. These include mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles. It is not a question of whether the number of species is declining, or the total number of animals measured, but rather how geographical populations of animal species are performing, which can be compared over time. Some populations are increasing, for example mountain gorillas, while others, such as river dolphins, are declining. But overall, things are going backwards for wildlife. Wild vertebrate populations have declined by an average of 69 percent between 1970 and 2018. A rainforest expert at the Worldwide Fund for Nature says:
“You think about your children and everything you might think about, how it’s going to happen. At the same time, we know that it’s actually possible to reverse this trend for some, but there are cases where a species has completely disappeared and there is no way back, and unfortunately these are increasing. There are various explanations for the decline of many species, but the main one is that substances and pesticides are spreading. Habitats are being exploited and destroyed, deforestation, industrial agriculture, hunting on a capital scale, mechanized fishing, environmental pollution and climate change. He says: The greatest decline is in tropical countries. In South and Central America, species have declined by 94 percent. There is also a similar development in Africa and tropical Asia. Animals that live in lakes and rivers are the worst affected. There, stocks of fish, birds and frogs, among others, have declined by an average of 83 percent”.
Animals are also rapidly declining in numbers. The following chart from the Worldwide Fund for Nature illustrates this trend.
Chart 11: It should be noted that for decades, industrial and advanced fishing and hunting on a large scale by advanced and powerful capitalist countries such as European countries, Japan, China, and many others have been systematically carried out in all four corners of the world on land, water, and air with advanced equipment and techniques. An example of this was the unwillingness of the world’s major social capitals at the fifth meeting to reach a global agreement to protect the oceans and aquatic life, which, according to its spokesperson, failed. Negotiations to ratify the UN “High Seas Treaty” were underway for two weeks in New York in August this year (Morocco 2022), but the capital governments were unable to agree on its provisions. International waters cover approximately two-thirds of the world’s oceans, but only 1.2 percent of them have been agreed upon between governments.
A new analysis (published in September 2022 in the journal Science) suggests that if current warming trends continue, the Earth is at risk of crossing six “dangerous” climate equilibrium boundaries. Crossing these boundaries would disrupt Earth’s systems in ways that would lead to the collapse of polar ice caps and the destruction of coral reefs. Scientists have previously said that reaching such a point would be a climate “emergency.” The researchers analysed these boundaries by analysing 200 studies published since 2008, including: The study, published in the journal Science, found that at current warming rates, there is already a risk of reaching these six climate abysses, and that the risk increases with every tenth of a degree Celsius increase in temperature. The Climate Action Tracker estimates that even in the most optimistic scenario, if current global warming targets are met, the world will see a 1.8°C increase in temperature compared to pre-industrial capitalism. The idea of “climate equilibrium limits” was first proposed two decades ago by the UN climate panel, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). According to the United Nations, crossing these boundaries could trigger significant changes in the functioning of Earth’s systems, changes that would affect the state of the oceans, climate and chemical processes and would be “irreversible.” Once an “equilibrium boundary” is crossed, the process of system failure will be spontaneous, meaning it will continue even without further warming: like a ball rolling down a hill that will never stop. Irreversible waterfall:
At the time, it was thought that these boundaries would only be crossed if the Earth’s average temperature rose by more than 5 degrees Celsius. But since then, increasing evidence has emerged that these boundaries could be breached much sooner. The six equilibrium boundaries that the new study says are “likely” to be crossed include: 1. The collapse of the Greenland ice sheet; 2. The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet; 3. The collapse of ocean currents in the Arctic North Atlantic; 4. Mass die-off of coral reefs at low latitudes; 5. The sudden melting of the Arctic ice cap; and 6. The sudden disappearance of sea ice in the Barents Sea.
Lead author David Armstrong-Mackay, from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, University of Exeter and the Earth Commission, said some of the unstable conditions that occur before a system collapses are already visible in the polar regions. The UN says Greenland and Antarctica are now melting ice at six times the rate they were 30 years ago, and the Greenland ice sheet has been shrinking steadily for the past 25 years, all due to climate change. Although some other “balance boundaries” – such as the shrinking Amazon rainforest – are not expected to be crossed until global warming reaches 3.5°C, all of these systems are interdependent. So, when one system starts to fail, the rest are more likely to collapse. Multiple balance boundaries: “It is important that many equilibrium elements in the Earth system are interconnected, which makes the possibility of a chain of equilibrium crossings one after another a new concern,” says Riccardo Winkelmann, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a member of the Earth Commission who co-authored the study. For example, if there are fewer glaciers and ice caps in the polar regions, less light is reflected from the Earth’s surface into space, making the Earth warmer. In addition to identifying the boundaries that are most likely to be crossed, the team also said that the list of potential equilibrium boundaries could increase to 16. In the above report, every effort has been made to postpone all the disasters and what is currently happening to the future! This is the method of capitalist institutions to pretend that everything depends on the will of managers, politicians and planners of capital, so that by turning a pencil on paper, the fate of man and human societies can take a different direction. A look at the writings so far, the research carried out and the results that are evident in our lives so far and present shows that the boundaries of equilibrium have already changed. Therefore, the possibility of crossing the boundaries of equilibrium is optimistic and delusional because all the parameters listed in this report indicate that the collapse of global glaciers is occurring, both in the Arctic and Antarctic, as has been witnessed for years, the terrible changes in ocean currents such as monsoons and El Niño, the occurrence of ultra-wide forest fires, terrible annual storms whose destruction and intensity break previous records every year, the destruction of marine corals and Siberian tundra, the increase in the temperature of the earth, air and oceans, the increasing acidity of rainwater and oceans, all indicate the disruption of the aforementioned balances.