How climate crisis is disrupting ecosystems?

CLIMATE CRISIS 

A Journal of People report

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

As the world is getting warmer and warmer many organisms native to lower latitudes or elevations are moving higher.

However, novel organisms moving into a new habitat could disturb the ecological balance, which has been established over a long period. Plants and herbivores are characterized by long-term co-evolution, shaping both their geographic distribution and the characteristics that they display in their occupied sites.

At higher elevations, this is seen in insect herbivores being generally less abundant and plants in turn being less well defended against herbivores, because of lower energy and shorter growing seasons. In contrast, low-elevation plant species defend themselves against more abundant and diverse herbivores, whether by means of spikes, thorns or hair, or by toxic substances. Climate change could disturb this ecological organization.

Climate Crisis: Change in global precipitation patterns

CLIMATE CRISIS 

A Journal of People report

Figure: Schematic illustration of the general circulation of the atmosphere for early and late Holocene latitudinal insolation gradients. Source: Inter-hemispheric synchroneity of Holocene precipitation anomalies controlled by Earth’s latitudinal insolation gradients, Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19021-3

The Earth’s climate system is largely determined by the differences in temperature between the tropics and the poles. Global warming is likely to cause global atmospheric circulation to change and progressively revert to a situation similar to that of 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. This is the conclusion of a study (Michael Deininger, Frank McDermott, Francisco W. Cruz, Juan Pablo Bernal, Manfred Mudelsee, Hubert Vonhof, Christian Millo, Christoph Spötl, Pauline C. Treble, Robyn Pickering, Denis Scholz. Inter-hemispheric synchroneity of Holocene precipitation anomalies controlled by Earth’s latitudinal insolation gradients. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19021-3 ) undertaken by a research team led by Dr. Michael Deininger, the results of which have been published in Nature Communications.

India’s Supreme Court Declines to Ban Farmers’ Protest

FARMERS’ PROTEST IN INDIA

A Journal of People report

Photo: The Wire

India’s Supreme Court on Friday declined calls to ban a weeks-long farmers’ protest and asked the government and unions to help form a committee of experts to mediate between them.

“We make it clear that we recognize the fundamental right to protest against a law. There is no question of balancing or curtailing it. But it should not damage anyone’s life or property,” Chief Justice S. A. Bobde said.

Thousands of farmers angered by three agricultural laws that they say threaten their livelihoods have intensified their protests by blocking highways and camping out on the outskirts of the capital New Delhi.

Petitioners had approached the Supreme Court to complain that the protests had hampered drivers and making it difficult for people to access emergency medical services.

2021’s Most Pressing Humanitarian Crises Are All Victims of US War, Regime Change

THE WRATH OF U.S. EMPIRE

Alan Macleod

MintPress News | December 16, 2020

The International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) yearly report on the world’s most pressing humanitarian situations has just been published, with the three most disastrous cases — Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria — all the product of decades of interventionist U.S. foreign policy.

For the third year in a row, Yemen has topped the IRC list, the report estimating that 80% of the country’s 29 million citizens are in need of humanitarian assistance. “The world is facing unprecedented humanitarian emergencies—as well as a political crisis of inaction by world leaders,” they warn.

The Commodification of Online Cooperation

CAPITALISM

Joshua Sperber

Monthly Review | November 01, 2020

A Grubhub delivery person checks his phone during the coronavirus pandemic on May 3, 2020 in New York City. Credit: “Uber may buy Grubhub in food-delivery fight,” China Daily, March 5, 2020.

On June 16, 2017, it was announced that the online retail giant Amazon planned to purchase the Whole Foods supermarket chain. Shocking the financial markets and challenging popular conceptions concerning the range and ambitions of the digital economy, Amazon’s buyout showed that the digital economy is not only helping shutter many traditional “brick and mortar” stores, but it also appears to be intent on recreating what remains of the traditional economy in its own image. Analysts were quick to point out that Amazon’s entry into the supermarket industry would likely benefit consumers by reducing prices while harming workers through lowering wages and eliminating jobs. While such cost-benefit calculations are structurally inadequate insofar as newly unemployed workers are also consumers, it is equally true—although less scrutinized—that consumers, regardless of their status as wage earners, also perform work. Notwithstanding paeans to Amazon’s innovative application of labor-saving (in fact, wage-labor saving) technologies, the digital economy’s reduction of consumer prices has been offset not only by a reduction in wages, but also by the systematic incorporation of customers into the production process.

NATO, Past and Future

EMPIRE’S INSTRUMENTS

Wolfgang Streeck

New Left Review | December 16, 2020

President Biden is not yet in office, but the sighs of relief in Europe’s polite political society are ear-splitting – anyone but Trump! In Germany, where people always have a firm view on whom other people must and must not elect, 95 percent rejoice that Trump is gone. Note, however, that while he may be gone as POTUS, there is a good chance, unless he goes to jail, but perhaps even then, that he will continue to be a powerful presence as leader of a powerful United States’ disloyal opposition.

In any case, hoping for the good old days of hyperglobalization to return, and ‘populism’ to vanish into the dark, European politicians are revelling in happy narratives of rule-bound multilateral global governance in the good old liberal international order (LIO), when an incoming American president could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as a thank you just for taking office – conjuring up a past that never was, in a desperate effort to turn it into a future that never will be. In the lead are the Germans, in Berlin and Brussels (where Frau von der Leyen is working overtime to express transatlantic enthusiasm). Included in their love letters to Washington is a mysterious morning gift: a promise that ‘the Europeans’ will from now on carry a ‘larger share’ of the ‘common burden’ and accept more ‘responsibility’ for themselves and the ‘West’.

Elections and Building Socialism Under Hybrid War: A Venezuelan Perspective

VENEZUELAN PEOPLE’S STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALISM

 Zoe PC

People’s Dispatch | December 15, 2020

Streets of Caracas “Chavistas always”. Photo: Zoe PC

Over 5 million Venezuelans went to the polls on Sunday, December 6 to elect the 277 members of the legislative assembly. The Great Patriotic Pole alliance of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won the majority and will occupy 253 seats, and opposition parties will occupy the remaining 24 seats.

The elections brought an end to five years of control over the legislative body by the far-right opposition that used the assembly to advance an anti-government, pro-coup, pro-sanctions agenda. The elections were another manifestation of the people’s will against the US-backed anti-democratic opposition led by Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López which had called for an election boycott.

Bezos Earns More in One Second than Amazon Worker Makes in Two Months

BEZOS’ SALARY

Peter Lazenby

Morning Star | December 18, 2020

AMAZON boss Jeff Bezos is paid more for one second than his warehouse workers earn in two months, analysis by the TUC revealed today.

The research shows that it would take an Amazon warehouse worker, typically on £9.50 an hour, more than eight weeks – or 284 hours based on a 35-hour week – to make what their chief executive pockets in a single second – estimated at roughly £2,700.

Mr Bezos is now paid over one million times more than the workers who create Amazon’s profits, according to the figures.

Super Rich Pharma Companies Making ‘Privatised’ Vaccines with Public Cash, Campaigners Warn

BIG PHARMA’S COVID BUSINESS

Morning Star | December 18, 2020

BIG pharma companies toting more income than many wealthy and oil-rich nations are posing a “serious obstacle to wiping out Covid-19” having produced “privatised” vaccines with public money, campaigners warned today.

Some of the corporations producing Covid-19 treatments have a history of ripping off the NHS, profiteering from disease and market manipulation, research by Global Justice Now has found.

BBC Urged to Reveal Costs of Countering Equal Pay and Race Discrimination Claims

THE HYPOCRISY OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Lamiat Sabin

Morning Star | December 18, 2020

BBC Broadcasting House in London

MPs have expressed dissatisfaction after the BBC claimed that it could not provide a breakdown of the legal costs it incurred in opposing equal-pay and race-discrimination claims in employment tribunals.

The digital, culture, media and sport committee had asked BBC director-general Tim Davie to provide further information about the broadcaster’s spending on lawyers to fight such cases.