Tipping Point

Tipping Point- Tipping points can occur during climate change when the climate reaches a state such that strong amplifying feedbacks are activated by only moderate additional warming.

What the citizens of the earth need is to create our own tipping point! Reaching the point where radical social change occurs, to save life on our beautiful planet. We can not continue to plunder the planet for ever increasing profit - humankind is effecting Earth like a deadly parasite this has to stop.

 

You can contact Tipping Point by emailing to: TippingPoint@riseup.net or writing to Tipping Point , P.O . Box 7500, Newtown, Wellington, New Zealand

New Page started on articles connected to the recent United Nations conference on climate change in Bali.

 

Our view on the symptoms, science and solutions to climate change - from Camp for Climate Action UK

The environmental problem.
Emissions of carbon dioxide, mostly from oil, gas and coal are rapidly raising the temperature and changing the weather. This is happening faster than at virtually any time in the Earths history. Most scientists, and even governments, agree that if we keep to business-as-usual then people, society in general and the ecosystems we all rely on for food and water will not be able to adapt to such rapid changes.

The scale of the problem is mind-boggling: the new report from the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change says that if we continue with rapidly increasing fossil-fuel use, global average temperatures may rise by 6 degrees Celsius. The last time this happened was 251 million years ago and some 99% of all living individuals died. We must rapidly and radically reduce oil, gas and coal use.
The social problem.
Almost everything we do produces carbon dioxide emissions: work, travel, housing. To cut emissions, as many scientists suggest, by 90%, means serious changes need to happen. Who is going to solve climate change? The usual answer is either governments and changes in regulations, or individuals affecting companies by changing the products and services we buy. This is not going to work for one simple reason: the world is geared towards the extraction of profit, and increasing economic growth, and not lives of dignity for all. Just ask any of the 800 million people who will go hungry today. Profits come first. With this reality in mind, it’s easy to understand why only the rhetoric changes. And emissions keep rising.

We, so-called ordinary people, will have to solve the worlds problems, largely in spite of the actions of governments and corporations. This social problem - the logic of economic growth superseding all else - is not new. The solution - that widespread grassroots social movements are key agents of change - is also not new. There is just a new urgency. We believe that climate change is effectively a referendum on what kind of world we want. A lot is going to change, whether we like it or not. So we’d better be involved in the creation of something much better than the world as it is now. To do this we must search for solutions that both reduce emissions and make our lives better.
Solutions?
Too big a problem? Too small a person? Join with others!

 

 

 

“Some experts are calling for 60-80% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, but these would only stabilise greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at today’s levels. Given the time lag between emitting greenhouse gases and seeing the consequences (the weather we get today was cooked up over 100 years ago), we actually need to cut emissions by 90% in order to get the atmosphere back to pre-industrial levels.” Rising Tide UK

“In 20 or 30 years time, should we not change our ways, we’ll be committed to emissions increases that will see forests burn, soils decay, oceans rise, and millions of people die. If we don’t get this issue right, so much else is lost too.”
www.climatecamp.org.uk

Our society faces “a breakdown not only of its values and institutions, but also of its natural environment. This problem is not unique to our times” but previous environmental destruction “pales before the massive destruction of the environment that has occurred since the days of the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the end of the Second World War. The damage inflicted on the environment by contemporary society encompasses the entire world . . . The exploitation and pollution of the earth has damaged not only the integrity of the atmosphere, climate, water resources, soil, flora and fauna of specific regions, but also the basic natural cycles on which all living things depend.” (Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom,)

“Our governments appear quietly to have abandoned their aim of preventing dangerous climate change. If so, they condemn millions to death. What the IPCC report shows is that we have to stop treating climate change as an urgent issue. We have to start treating it as an international emergency.” John James, Countercurrents