Secretary-General António Guterres delivers his special address on climate action from the American Museum of Natural History in New York on June 5, 2024. United Nations
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called for immediate action to avoid the world being in “climate hell” after this May was the warmest ever recorded, according to a recent report from the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
“It’s climate crunch time,” Guterres said at New York’s American Museum of Natural History on Wednesday, as UN News reported. “We stand at a moment of truth.”
Guterres emphasized that, though the need for measures to combat the climate crisis globally is at an all-time high, so are the occasions for sustainable development and economic prosperity.
“In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger, we are the danger. But, we are also the solution,” Guterres said.
The UN chief cited C3S in saying emissions worldwide must be reduced by nine percent annually to maintain the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature limit established in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Global emissions increased by one percent last year.
On Wednesday, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization said the temperature threshold has an 80 percent likelihood of being surpassed within the next five years.
“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” Guterres said, as reported by UN News. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell, and the truth is we have control of the wheel.”
As the U.S. faces another potentially record heat wave this week, the Middle East and Europe’s Mediterranean have endured extreme temperatures that have proven deadly.
The big picture: Multiple heat-related deaths have been reported in Greece during the country’s earliest heat wave on record and Jordan’s official news agency said Sunday “14 Jordanian pilgrims died and 17 others were missing” in the searing heat while on the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
Tourists outside the Acropolis during high temperatures in Athens, Greece, on June 12, when authorities announced the closure of the ancient site for five hours due to soaring temperatures that also shut schools. Photo: Hilary Swift/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The heat waves sweeping these regions this month have been made “at least five times more likely” because of human-caused climate change, per new Climate Central analysis.
Context: Climate Central’s analysis is based on the group’s Climate Shift Index (CSI), which compares observed or forecast temperatures with simulations of the same weather conditions minus excess atmospheric greenhouse gases, per Alex Fitzpatrick.
The idea is to compare real-world conditions with what might have been the case had human-caused climate change been absent.
Saudi Arabia had a CSI of 5, meaning that human-caused climate change made a given daily average temperature five times more likely as of Monday morning. Greece, which has endured two weeks of extreme heat, had a CSI of 5 last week and 2 on Monday. Parts of Turkey had a CSI of 5.
A joint report by UN and European Union agencies found in April that Europe’s temperatures are rising about twice as fast the global average due to human-caused climate change — making it the fastest-warming continent on Earth.
Jeremy Corbyn addresses supporters outside Islington Town Hall, north London, after handing in his nomination papers for the General Election on July 4, June 5, 2024
Praful Nargund, who is bidding to unseat Mr Corbyn, is a private health entrepreneur and has said privatisation is needed in the NHS
LABOUR’S imposed candidate in Islington North, Praful Nargund, has refused to attend hustings organised by Keep our NHS Public, forcing their cancellation.
The move is no surprise since Mr Nargund, bidding to unseat Jeremy Corbyn, is a private health entrepreneur who has said privatisation is needed in the NHS.
The no-hope Tory candidate for the seat also decided to duck the debate, forcing its cancellation.
Mr Corbyn, by way of contrast, spoke to hundreds at a rally in support of the NHS held in the constituency at the weekend.
Canvassing reports indicate massive support for the former Labour leader, particularly in the working-class areas of the constituency.
And in neighbouring Holborn and St Pancras, held by Mr Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader, independent challenger Andrew Feinstein is outgunning Sir Keir Starmer on the streets.
Veterans mobilize in front of the White House on June 8. (Photo: Mandy Wilkens)
Peoples Dispatch speaks to US veterans who are standing against their government’s complicity in genocide and organizing more to do the same
On February 25, US Air Force member Aaron Bushnell became the first active duty US soldier to earn the title of “martyr” among oppressed people worldwide. The 25-year-old set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC in protest of the US government’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza, declaring, “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,” before self-immolating.
Bushnell’s sacrifice was the most high-profile action by member of the US army in solidarity with Palestine and signaled an enormous sea change among active duty military as well as veterans—who are increasingly taking a bold step to denounce their government’s involvement in genocide.
According to Mike Prysner, who was an active duty soldier during the Iraq War and has been organizing veterans and active duty military ever since, the momentum among current and former members of the US military “hasn’t been this high since the Bush era.”
“The sector of service members who have turned against the US/Israeli policy in a profound way is undoubtedly much bigger than we can see at the moment—one the Pentagon is no doubt aware of as well,” Prysner wrote.
As Prysner told Peoples Dispatch, although the anti-war veterans movement is not as big as it was during the Iraq invasions, it is significant that veterans are organizing at such a high level today because unlike Iraq, the genocide in Palestine is “not a direct US war.”
“Most service members haven’t had direct experience with supporting Israel,” Prysner said. “They’re just disgusted by the fact that the military they served in and are serving in is playing a support and a propaganda role.”
However, Prysner notices significant anti-war momentum in the US Air Force in particular, which “does have more of a direct role in the other branches” in Gaza, in terms of “all the logistics that Israel needs” to carry out genocide. “I have noticed the active duty of the Air Force becoming more engaged because of their direct role,” Prysner says, including Bushnell.
“The potential for there to be unrest within the military is historically something that plays a major impact in adding to the pressure on Washington to end the war,” Prysner told Peoples Dispatch.
Shortly after Bushnell’s self-immolation, Prysner worked with other veterans of the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars to organize an action in Portland in which former US military members burned their uniforms collectively in protest. This type of action was later repeated throughout the country as other veterans and active duty military drew inspiration from the momentum.
Veterans in Portland, Oregan also recently organized a massive projection of anti-war imagery on a US Navy warship docked for “Fleet Week”. The images had slogans such as “Stop the US war machine” and “Blood is on your hands”.
Not only do veterans organizing within the anti-war movement inspire active duty military to take further action as well, but they also galvanize the entire anti-imperialist movement, says Prysner. He references the contingent of veterans who attended the recent 100,000-strong protest in front of the White House on June 8. Prysner noticed “a lot of excitement among the attendees” of the protest that veterans had mobilized.
On June 8, Peoples Dispatch spoke to two of the veterans who attended the mass mobilization in front of the White House to declare a “people’s red line” against genocide. Adrian served in the Air Force from 2002 to 2009, and went to Iraq. He now openly identifies as both an anti-imperialist and Marxist, organizing with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and credits his time in the military as contributing to his shift in consciousness.
“War is a profit-making business,” US vet declares
“As a person who served in the United States Air Force, I’m very familiar with how the imperialist war machine works. Naturally, this isn’t something that one joins the military knowing. It was part of the whole radicalization process for me, being in the military, realizing that it functions very much like a corporate entity, and that war is a profit-making business,” Adrian told Peoples Dispatch.
“It was part of my being a working class person in the military, coming from the background that I came from, going to a foreign country to fight other poor and oppressed people, that created such a cognitive dissonance in me, that I had to address it in some sort of way.”
Adrian continued, “there are many things that active duty people, reservists and guardsmen can do. They can conscientiously object and thus separate from the military, but they can also organize outside of the military. They can attend rallies. They can organize with professional revolutionary organizations such as our own. They can do many other things to raise consciousness and awareness among their fellow servicemen.”
Chris Stevens, who was an infantryman in the US Army from 2007 and 2013, told Peoples Dispatch what his message is to prospective, current, and former service members who are disgusted by US complicity in genocide.
“Don’t be seduced in the first place. If you’ve yet to sign a contract, you should turn the other way. Your recruiter’s lying to you about everything, whether it be the job that you can have or the life that you’ll lead, the benefits that they promise you are not cast in stone and they will take anything they can from you,” Stevens said, referencing the predatory US military recruitment process.
Military recruiters in the US notoriously prey on working class and oppressed youth to lead them into military careers, luring them with promises of free college education. This phenomenon is part of what anti-war activists dub the “poverty draft,” in which poor young people have few opportunities apart from joining the US military, risking life and limb, and participating in the imperialist machine.
“For those who are already involved, my message is that you don’t have to listen to what they tell you to do,” Stevens continued. “There are significant historical examples from the Vietnam and Iraq wars, where entire units have decided to say no to their orders. As long as it’s not you alone resisting, if you can get a squad or a company together to say, we will not participate in this, there’s not much that the army can do.”
“So if you’re in a position where you are actively supporting this genocide that’s happening in Israel, you don’t have to,” Stevens said.
The issue of Palestine was particularly galvanizing, as Adrian mentioned: “I don’t want to see children murdered anymore. This is beyond the pale of what can be justified in the name of nationalism, in the name of anything that would be any semblance of what one would call the sovereignty of a so-called nation. The self-determination of the Palestinian people is paramount to humanity. And their fight is our fight.”
Reform UK chairman Richard Tice (left) and party leader Nigel Farage launch ‘Our Contract with You’ in Merthyr Tydfil while on the General Election campaign trail, June 17, 2024
REFORM started targeting Labour “red wall” voters today as the hard-right party launched its reactionary election manifesto in Wales.
The party’s owner and leader Nigel Farage went to Merthyr Tydfil, once represented by Labour pioneer Keir Hardie, to tell voters that “Labour is not very different to the Conservatives … it is just more incompetent.”
And he restated his aim of being the main challenger to Labour for government by 2029, likely date of the next general election following July 4.
The nationalist party’s platform is anti-migrant, opposed to climate action and supportive of NHS privatisation while cutting foreign aid and leaving the European Court of Human Rights.
It aims to take advantage of muted enthusiasm for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour in working-class communities by rekindling the Brexit divisions it skilfully exploited in 2019.
Reform’s increasing prominence in the general election comes as the Tory Party’s campaign looks on the verge of expiring.
