WHEN SVANTE ARRHENIUS DID HIS CALCULATIONS IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY, HE PREDICTED THAT THE AMOUNT OF CO2 RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE BY THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION STARTED 50 YEARS EARLIER WAS ENOUGH TO RAISE GLOBAL TEMPERATURES BY ABOUT 2 (TWO) DEGREES CELSIUS. 

WAS HE CORRECT?

To a great degree, Arrhenius was accurate. Yet more than 130 years later, with emissions of CO2 from our industries having gone more than ten folds on his input, our planet has only warmed up by 1.49 degrees Celsius… 

What happened? What is happening and what will happen? 

The industrial revolution changed the Western World, which in turn changed the rest of the human planet…

Until this revolution based on coal, then oil, the human world was in the throws of colonialism, slavery and husbandry. Most societies were ruled by kings, queens and emperors, while some attempts had been made for people self-rule under budding republics, and/or pseudo democracies with a king/queen as the head of state.

The industrial revolution improved our general comforts. The middle class could grow with different and better social needs.

The new republic of America chose a different path to those of European countries — in using equality of OPPORTUNITY within the superior white race, while keeping slavery as a tool of wealth-making — until the civil war. By then the system of wealth-making (minus the “official” slavery) was well oiled — and ingrained in the American psyche.

Though capitalism had been birthed in England’s special mercantile Enlightenment, this method of financing social interactions was perfected by the United States of America. Greed and deal-making were the glues of social structure in which everyone could become rich, if one had something to sell. 

In Europe, there was social unrest and most of the problems were balanced between unionism and socialism, versus the old guard of the former nobility now in control of the countries cash flow. This unsettled social panoply included governments that changed from socialist to conservative, depending on the unsuccessful wealth and poverty management. This also led to war, especially when England did not want Germany to become too powerful. Twice. France tagged along to regain its lost provinces as Russia is presently doing in Eastern Ukraine. 

There was a major split though, in 1917, when the ideal of people-power became the revolutionary spirit of Russia. New technologies, including transmission of information and the desire of SOME people to rule others than being ruled, tacked upon already expressed Marxist philosophy of equality rather than hierarchical and dynastically authoritarianism that had prevailed. 

This is when, the united States of America, that had invested troops to defend the Russian Tzar started to think that the new “people-power” — which demanded everyone to be on the same level — was a threat to capitalism… Capitalism encouraged control of people through “columns of greed” rather than through ideology. For years, the United States fought the concepts of “communism” and “socialism” against their own belief in freedom and the power of money. The markets rule, not the people. Creating demand, consumption, advertising and production became entangled in an ever expanding merry-go-round, due to the need of borrowing cash with interest to finance the engine of growth. Growth demands MORE GROWTH…

Meanwhile a lot of the wealth generated came from a single LINE OF resources: fossil fuels… No  matter how we look at the accounts, around ninety per cent of the economy of the United States of America is fossil fuel based.

Has the Industrial Revolution unleashed a monster?

By now, emission of CO2 of the human planet is increasing by three (3) per cent per year. Many countries, as hard as they try to curb their emissions of global warming gases, are demanding improvements to their social conditions — from poverty to middle class — which demand more energy consumption — most of which still coming from fossil fuels. 

WE ALL CONTRIBUTE TO THIS INCREASE. 

In light of the 2 (two) degrees Celsius mentioned by Arrhenius, we have gotten away with murder… or have we?

For about 20 years on this site, we have exposed the REALITY of the MAJOR problem WHICH IS THE DELAY IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CAUSES, THE FEEDBACK MECHANISMS AND THE RESULTANT EFFECT. 

WE ARE ON TRACK FOR AN INCREASE OF AT LEAST 7 DEGREES CELSIUS BY 2150… What? 

This would not be the first time the planet would experience such high temperature, leading to no polar ice and sea level more than 75 metres above present. 

The difference between then and now is the INDUCTION of the change. PRESENTLY, THE CLIMATIC CHANGE IS ANTHROPOGENIC — human induced… Trust the sciences on this one, trust old Gus if you don’t understand the facts and figure… 

DISMISS ALL THE MORONS THAT CLAIM GOBLA WARMING ISN’T HAPPENING. BE RUDE IF YOU MUST, because you will go blue in the face trying to explain to them that 2 + 2 equals 4, when they still think the earth is flat, despite being intelligent… 

WE ARE ON TRACK FOR A MAJOR CLIMATIC CHANGE IN 2032…

Gus Leonisky — 22 MARCH 2025

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/4446

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/33287

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BELOW, AN ARTICLE FROM 2021:

Ecology or Death by Camille Étienne (born 29 May 1998)

Ce n’est plus la peine de se réfugier derrière d’abstraites « générations futures » : nous sommes la première génération à vivre les conséquences du dérèglement climatique. Et nous sommes certainement la dernière à avoir encore le luxe de choisir entre léguer un monde qui ressemblera à celui dans lequel nous sommes nés, ou bien un monde en transformation rapide, transfiguré par des bouleversements imprévisibles et catastrophiques. Les émissions de gaz à effet de serre ont une forme d’inertie, une durée de vie qui fait que nous sommes actuellement en train de subir les effets des émissions de nos grands-parents. Les quantités criminelles de gaz à effet de serre que nous émettons aujourd’hui engagent donc la survie de nos enfants. Un joli patrimoine pour un drôle d’héritage.

There's no longer any point in hiding behind abstract "future generations": we are the first generation to experience the consequences of climate change. And we are certainly the last to still have the luxury of choosing between leaving a world that resembles the one we were born into, or a rapidly transforming world, transfigured by unpredictable and catastrophic upheavals. Greenhouse gas emissions have a form of inertia, a lifespan that means we are currently suffering the effects of our grandparents' emissions. The criminal quantities of greenhouse gases we emit today therefore threaten the survival of our children. A nice legacy for a strange inheritance.

However, the choice of the title "Ecology or Death" for this edition does not reflect a taste for grim predictions, because we no longer have the luxury of living in projections: already today, we are dying from climate change. Already today, in France, we are dying from climate change. We are suffocating, we are asphyxiating, we are passing away. Every year, 40,000 people die prematurely from air pollution in our country. And this is only a tiny fraction of the damage our production-driven model is already causing, here and elsewhere. We are paying the price, relegated to the rank of collateral damage of a growth that benefits a minority while the majority suffers.

"Ecology or Death," then. But what kind of ecology are we talking about? And whose death, or what? It is crucial to move away from an "environmentalism" that defends from afar a nature from which we exclude ourselves, even in the very etymology of the word—the environment is what surrounds us and of which we are therefore not a part. Ecology is not environmentalism because it defines our ways of being in the world, of being alive. It is a matter of relationships between human societies and the environments they inhabit, the non-human species on which they depend, and not of decor, landscape, or the "protection" of a nature that could be restored like a painting.

As it deals with relations of domination (often) and cooperation (sometimes), the ecological question is necessarily social and inseparable from the notion of justice. Behind CO2 emissions: privileges and oppression; At the bend of a methane curve: inequality. This same machine that crushes the weak exerts pressure on our ecosystems and the humans who compose them. Our responsibility is historical: as future parents, perhaps, but here and now as Westerners. We have built a certain level of development thanks to the plundering of resources from the so-called Global South, and now they are the first victims of climate change. Double punishment, a consequence of the gluttony of a few in our midst. Rising sea levels, droughts and famines, conflicts over dwindling resources... They are on the front lines of a war they themselves did not declare.

Utopia has changed sides.

So there are those who are revolted by this and who are fighting back. We talk about a "climate generation" that I invite you to join regardless of your age, because our clocks show the same time: the time of action, resistance, disquiet, the time of tipping points and the sixth mass extinction. But as I write these lines, COP26 has just ended, and once again, the climate generation has had to watch helplessly as a generation of fossils unfolds. A generation that believes in GDP growth like we believe in Santa Claus. It makes you wonder who these children really are, as the lines between fiction and reality become blurred. Faced with tangible evidence, faced with planetary limits, the depletion of our resources, the collapse of ecosystems, faced with megafires, famines, and droughts, there are our collective fictions. These are the realities that we put aside, whose contours we negotiate through COPs or conventions, that we present as "ideology", an opinion, a hobby, a passion.

Conversely, our collective or imposed narratives, our myths and fictions—the possibility of infinite growth in a finite world, for example—are presented as immutable, objective, and natural. We assert that another narrative, another way of inhabiting the world, is possible. We simply need to invent it or resume the work that others have begun. "Enough" is an understatement given the situation. But we need this courage because, behind these seemingly theoretical considerations, lives, human and non-human, present and future, are at stake.

Ecology or death, then. A reference to Utopia or Death, the book by René Dumont, the first Green candidate in the 1974 presidential election. Today, I believe that utopia, this imaginary and somewhat fanciful "non-place," has changed sides: it is on the side of those who believe we can continue this frantic race for growth while pretending we don't know there's a finish line, and that we may even have already crossed it.

Being 23 today means being anxious. Eco-anxious. And my anxiety doesn't come so much from projecting myself into a world 4, 5, or even 7°C warmer, but from this gap between the power and gravity of the experts' cries of alarm and the lack of response from our decision-makers. This is, moreover, the finding of the largest study ever conducted on climate anxiety among young people, published in The Lancet last September, which shows for the first time that climate-related psychological distress is greater when individuals consider the government response to be inadequate.

I also believe it would be wise to change the vocabulary on this subject. We talk about inaction on the part of our decision-makers when, in reality, it is a deliberate and conscious action: the massive destruction of life is organized and consensual. Do you doubt it? French researchers Christophe Bonneuil, Pierre-Louis Choquet, and American Benjamin Franta have shown in their latest investigation how Total has been aware of the consequences of fossil fuel extraction on ecosystems since the 1970s. Too busy ensuring the survival of a business that kills, they preferred to lie, to fabricate doubt with expert opinions and speeches produced by highly paid lobbies to drown out the cries of alarm. To stifle them, much like cigarette companies did in the face of health scandals. It is therefore also against them that we must organize. At a time when fake news is parasitizing information, we must combat it with precise and rigorous knowledge, accompanied by radical actions that get to the root of the problem.

It's never too late for things to get worse.

Edgar Morin said that we had sacrificed the essential for the urgent and ended up forgetting the urgency of the essential. It's about taking the time to not waste any more. If I'm convinced of one thing, at the height of my 23 years, it's that knowledge is a power and a duty. Having it is a privilege and engenders a responsibility: to transmit it. Seeking to understand our world is more than necessary today. While time is pressing and UN summits more than ever take place at "one minute to midnight," while the UN Secretary General speaks of a "code red for humanity," the time taken for these 196 pages, among others, and those that will follow, is crucial. Learning, again, clarifying these figures that we think we know by heart; integrating these graphs of which we are the axes; understanding the lines of thought; entering into a history of struggles, keeping their memory alive so as not to forget the lessons. Always ask the question "how," question strategies: how to do it, how to raise awareness, how to begin, how to reach out, how to create laws, bans, reductions...? How can we act to change a history we're told is predetermined?

These are all questions we ask ourselves when fighting for the ecological cause, and which we've asked ourselves along with the editorial staff of Socialter. Because, hidden behind an apparent coldness of knowledge, there's us, there's you. Alongside us, in this laborious project, are authors who are sometimes deceased, often unknown, references like Dennis Meadows or Catherine Larrère, tireless activists like Vandana Shiva, or even murdered like Chico Mendes, threatened reporters, invisible victims, climate refugees... People like you and me for whom this emergency is a reality, sometimes a daily occurrence. We're publishing this issue just a few months before the presidential election, and it's no coincidence: dear readers, I'm counting on you to give some substance to the debate in the polis. I modestly hope to contribute to it with these few pages.

What gives me hope is that there is no deadline for action. It's never too late for things to be worse. But there is always time for them to be less unjust.

We are the first generation to experience the consequences of climate change, and the last with the power to do anything about it. If you are already fighting, in your own way and to your own extent, you may find the costume too big, the role too daunting—this is the case for me sometimes, even often. And yet we must not falter or give in. Our responsibility is great, and we cannot, we can no longer afford to wait for an elite enlightened by oil lamps to make decisions for us. We must disobey, get on our tractors, hop on our bikes, and take to the streets, engage in resistance, in creativity, get our hands dirty, put the Earth in our school curricula. And so much more. But the rest must be invented together. And together, we are an immense force. That is where the power lies, that is where ours is: to oppose their death with our lives.

https://www.socialter.fr/article/l-ecologie-ou-la-mort-par-camille-etienne

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

PICTURE AT TOP FROM SOCIALTER MAGAZINE