Lethal Heating: 09/09/19

09/09/2019

When Climate Change Is Stranger Than Fiction

New York Times - Alisha Haridasani Gupta

Amitav Ghosh, whose book “Gun Island” is set in an ecologically unstable world, wants literature to explore the environment as much as it does other crises.

Amitav Ghosh at home in Brooklyn. His 12th book, “Gun Island,” is about a rare book dealer drawn into a globe-spanning adventure with Bangladeshi migrants in Libya, dolphins in the Mediterranean and venomous water snakes in California. Credit Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times

How do you capture the realities of climate change in a novel — not just its causes and symptoms, but the ever-changing, ever-weirder ways it is manifesting, within the conventional framework of a story with a beginning, middle and end?
Answering that question is, according to the writer Amitav Ghosh, the literary world’s great challenge. “I feel completely convinced that we have to change our fictional practices in order to deal with the world that we’re in,” he said.
“Something this big and this important, there have to be an infinite number of ways to just talk about it,” he said, similar to how war, slavery, colonization, famine and other crises and events have seeped into so many forms of literature.
Ghosh, 63, is attempting to add something to the conversation with “Gun Island,” his 12th book. The novel, which comes out Tuesday, leaps from the United States, to the Sundarbans mangrove forest between India and Bangladesh, to Italy, places where rising temperatures and water levels have uprooted human and animal lives and upended political systems.
It centers on Dinanth Datta, a rare book dealer also known as Deen, who reluctantly sets off on an Indiana Jones-esque trip to a temple in the Sundarbans, seeking clues to an ancient Bengali legend. That visit thrusts him into an adventure that connects him with Bangladeshi migrants in Libya, dolphins in the Mediterranean and venomous water snakes in California, while touching on migration, xenophobia and technology.
In his 2016 nonfiction book of essays, “The Great Derangement,” Ghosh wrote about his ancestors, “ecological refugees long before the term was invented” who lived on the shores of the Padma River in what is now Bangladesh. “One day in the mid-1850s the great river suddenly changed course, drowning the village,” he writes. “It was this catastrophe that had unmoored our forebears.”

Amitav Ghosh’s “Gun Island” comes out Sept. 10. Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

About a century later, Ghosh was born in Kolkata, a city that sits near India’s border with Bangladesh and serves as the starting point for Deen’s journey. Ghosh’s life, like Deen’s, has stretched across countries, from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to Britain and eventually the United States, where he now lives.
While studying in New Delhi in the late 1970s, Ghosh experienced a tornado and hailstorm — phenomena previously unheard-of in India. He struggled to incorporate the episode into his fiction because, as he explained in “The Great Derangement,” it is difficult for a writer to use a case of “extreme improbability” without it seeming contrived.
Ghosh came up with the idea for “Gun Island” in the early 2000s when he was researching another novel, “The Hungry Tide,” that explores the rivers of the Sundarbans, whose ecosystem supports the endangered Bengal tiger and thousands of other species. But Ghosh could already see the impact of climate change: bigger waves and worsening cyclones that hindered farming. That shift, over the years, has directly or indirectly forced a sizable number of the four million inhabitants of the Sundarbans to flee to parts of India and Bangladesh.
“Gun Island” is likely to resonate in Italy, said Anna Nadotti, his friend and Italian translator of over 30 years, as the country grapples with an influx of migrants fleeing war, persecution and climate crises. “Politically, socially and also culturally, it’s important to give people all the means to understand what is really happening, why all these people are coming,” she said.
“Even if sometimes in ‘Gun Island’ Amitav invents, nothing is fictional,” she added, pointing out a scene from the book that is familiar to many Italians: a boat full of migrants, stranded at sea because it has been denied permission to dock.
At one point in “Gun Island,” Deen arrives in Los Angeles for an antiquarian book dealers conference at a museum. Wildfires burn nearby. The conference, at first, goes on. But soon, the bibliophiles, librarians and book dealers are told to evacuate because the winds are changing direction, making the blaze’s path increasingly unpredictable.
It seems to mirror when fires came perilously close to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2017, raising concerns they would destroy the artifacts inside. Ghosh said he wrote the scene six months earlier.
Later in the story, Deen confronts a freakish hailstorm and fierce “gusts of winds” in Venice. Two months ago, the real-life city was battered by hailstones and winds powerful enough to toss a cruise ship about.
That a novel seems to anticipate some of these unusual weather events is proof to Ghosh that literature should devote more attention to the environment.
“Fact,” he said, “is outrunning fiction.”

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Climate Change, Poverty And Human Rights: An Emergency Without Precedent

The Conversation - Lisa Benjamin | Meinhard Doelle | Sara L Seck

The effects of climate change will disproportionately affect the world's poorest

Julia Aylen wades through waist deep water carrying her pet dog as she is rescued from her flooded home during Hurricane Dorian in Freeport, Bahamas, Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2019. (AP Photo/Tim Aylen)

Hurricane Dorian has devastated communities in the Bahamas, putting the human dimensions of climate change at the forefront of the news as the world grapples with the ongoing failure of many governments to effectively decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Two recently released climate reports by the United Nations Human Rights Council provide insights into future challenges.
The July 2019 Safe Climate report by David Boyd, the special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, clarifies the obligations of states to protect human rights from climate harms. The report also confirms the existing responsibility of businesses to respect human rights, especially as they pertain to climate change.
An earlier report on climate change and poverty, released in June 2019, was written by Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. This report draws attention to the disproportionate and devastating impact of unmitigated climate change on those living in poverty.
Both reports point out that urgent action is needed by governments. Our research suggests that international human rights law may already offer useful tools to prevent and remedy climate injustice, including the responsibilities of business enterprises as reinforced in the Boyd report.
The Alston report classifies the human rights impacts of climate change as a climate apartheid in which the rich would “pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.” The scale of this climate emergency very much depends on the level of effort the global community puts into mitigation.

A Syrian refugee walks through the snow at an informal settlement camp in Lebanon, which experienced its harshest winter in years. UNHCR/Diego Ibarra Sánchez, CC BY

A 1.5-degree increase above pre-industrial levels may expose an additional 457 million people to climate-related risks including sea level rise, flooding, droughts, forest fires, damage to ecosystems, food production and the availability of drinking water.
A two-degree increase would put an additional 100 million to 400 million people at risk of hunger, and one billion to two billion may not have access to adequate water. A total of 140 million people in the poorest parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America could be displaced by climate change by 2050.
Both reports detail incidents of permanent climate loss and damage which exceed our financial and technological capacities to restore. Our recent research documents existing incidents of loss and damage in small, vulnerable countries. As we concluded in another recent contribution to Climate Policy, those harmed by human-induced climate change will increasingly seek restitution from those who have contributed to the harm suffered.

Scale of impact
Current mitigation commitments will still result in a three-degree or higher rise in global temperatures. Nationally determined commitments (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement leave a significant gap. Many countries are not yet on target to meet their existing NDC commitments.
The scale of the overall impact, even at 1.5 degrees, is unprecedented. Climate change will exacerbate existing poverty and inequality between developed and developing countries, and also within countries.
The inequity of this disproportionate impact is exacerbated by the fact that those living in poverty have contributed — and will continue to contribute — the least to the problem. The poorest half of the global population is responsible for only 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, a person in the top one per cent (which includes most middle class citizens in developed countries) is on average responsible for 175 times more emissions than a person in the bottom 10 per cent.

Sandbags on the seashore in Bangladesh to protect houses from rising sea levels due to climate change. Shutterstock

Seeking climate justice
Climate justice has been a constant refrain by many vulnerable, developing countries during climate negotiations. However, as developed countries grew rich by burning an irresponsible amount of fossil fuels, international human rights law has failed to determine the responsibility of wealthier countries to provide assistance to developing countries for climate action. Meanwhile, almost no attention has been paid to understanding how the independent responsibilities of business to respect human rights apply in the climate context.

Benjamin Schachter, Human Rights Officer, talks about how climate change disasters affect people’s lives.

However, while it is clear that developed countries are largely responsible for historic emissions, some of the major emitters listed in Richard Heede’s groundbreaking report are located in the global South, including countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, India, Venezuela, Mexico, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Algeria. This activity accumulated vast wealth for these industries and countries (or at least their governments), but has contributed to devastating climate-induced impacts for others.
The Alston report suggests that the only way to address the human rights dimensions of climate crisis is for states to effectively regulate businesses and for those harmed by climate change to successfully sue responsible companies in court. The implication is that in the absence of regulation, businesses do not have a responsibility to reduce emissions.
Yet, the UN’s “Key Messages on Climate Change and Human Rights” states that “businesses are also duty-bearers and must be accountable for their own climate impacts.”
Similarly, the 2018 statement on climate change of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights expressly notes that “corporate entities are expected to respect Covenant rights regardless of whether domestic laws exist or are fully enforced in practice.”
Various other initiatives have grappled with business responsibilities, including the 2018 Principles on Climate Obligations of Enterprises.
However, the Safe Climate report goes further, stating that businesses “must adopt human rights policies, conduct human rights due diligence, remedy human rights violations for which they are responsible, and work to influence other actors to respect human rights where relationships of leverage exist.” These responsibilities includes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from activities, products and services, minimizing emissions from suppliers and ensuring those impacted can access remedies.
The devastating impacts of climate change on those already living in poverty are increasingly difficult or impossible to avoid. Given the failure of many states to meet their own obligations, it is crucial that the responsibility of businesses to respect human rights be taken seriously by those advocating for climate action. Businesses, as organs of society, must ratchet up their existing responsibilities to alleviate increasing climate impacts on those who can least afford to bear them.

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Women Take The Lead On Climate Change

Canberra Times - Rod Taylor

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows that in 2018, most of the natural hazards which affected nearly 62 million people were associated with extreme weather and climate.
Floods continue to affect the largest number of people, more than 35 million globally. Hurricanes are becoming billion-dollar disasters and the exposure of agriculture to climate extremes is threatening food security.
At a time when the IPCC State of the Climate report shows impacts accelerating, you'd expect to see political leadership, especially in an advanced country like Australia where our land and economy are particularly vulnerable.

Joining the Homeward Bound program this year is marine scientist Dr Elisabeth Deschaseaux. Picture: Supplied

The need for women to fill the leadership void is more urgent than ever. Currently, less than 26 per cent of the world's researchers are women and even fewer are in leadership roles, which leads to unbalance and clearly is a great loss in decision-making.

How do we get women in climate leadership?
Homeward Bound aims to address this imbalance by building over 10 years, a network of 1000 women working together to create innovative changes. It is a 12-month leadership program that gives women in science the skills, knowledge and confidence to become leaders and make decisions that will help shape our planet.
It culminates in a three-week workshop in Antarctica where future female leaders will brainstorm climate change and gender equity in leadership roles.
Antarctica has been chosen because over the last 50 years it has experienced some of the greatest warming on Earth, making it one of the most affected ecosystems due to human-induced climate change.
It is a wild and isolated environment where participants are pushed to their limits while disconnecting from their regular lives. It is a place for introspective and challenging thinking.
Joining the Homeward Bound program this year is marine scientist Dr Elisabeth Deschaseaux from Southern Cross University who works on a special marine-sourced compound called dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a biogenic sulfur gas that may have the capacity to counteract climate change.
Each participant has been asked to fundraise $24,500 to cover the cost of the program. You can help her and win interesting perks. Visit www.chuffed.org/project/women-for-climate-actions.

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