BRT Repost ... Back in 2015, yours truly chanced upon Sir Halford Mackinder's extraordinary take on world politics with his notion that the future of world power will reside in Euro-Asia, the great landmass connecting three continents forever separate from North and South America and Australia. Seems his prescient analysis is spot on given just how inept and bankrupt the US (and west) has become regarding it's obsession with endless war and it's total lack of understanding why The Art of War really matters for the continued wellbeing of any entity wishing to call itself a viable nation.
In 2022, this 2015 notion's accurate to a fault but now, the impact of GW on the fate of the world looms ever larger as phase transitions are never linear and proof of that is seen by estimates of water rise in just 30 years exceeding the guesstimates made by researchers made just a few years ago.
Global sea level has been rising over the past century, and the rate has increased in recent decades. In 2014, global sea level was 2.6 inches 67 mm above the 1993 average—the highest annual average in the satellite record (1993-present). Sea level continues to rise at a rate of about one-eighth of an inch 3.2 mm per year.
Click https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ to see how high the ocean will rise. Intense without question.
What this means to countries and the fate of the world becomes scary, dire predictions made by James Lovelock 15 years ago and now, with Alfred M. Mccoy, a superb writer who takes the long view on issues as serious as this.
Alfred McCoy, Professor of History at UW-Madison. His new book is Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation
We’re in a time of growing belligerence of a kind unknown since the Cold War. It’s already taken us to the edge of conflict with nuclear-armed great powers, whether in Ukraine or Taiwan and the South China Sea. Meanwhile, here at home (and in other countries globally), internal divisions, flaring anger, and violence are growing. And yet the true violence, the true war, the one those aggressive great powers are already waging in a major way goes largely unnoticed and remarkably undealt with, perhaps because it’s a genuine world war on humanity and the planet itself.
In case you’re not living in the American Southwest, that region has been experiencing “megadrought” conditions. (The whole west is, in fact, drought-stricken right now.) And that would be bad enough, but a new study by climate scientists indicates that the Southwest has been going through “the driest two decades in the region in at least 1,200 years” and, no surprise, climate change is significantly to blame. We’re talking about a catastrophe — one that, as yet, shows no signs of abating and that in the long run is only going to get worse.
If lack of water is a problem in the Southwest, here’s the “good” — actually, terrible — news: this country’s coasts are going to be anything but short of water. According to another new study, sea levels around this country are going to rise by something like a foot in the next three decades (more even than the global average). In other words, while parts of the U.S. broil, other parts will functionally drown, with ever more disastrous flooding occurring ever more often. Again, this is due to the never-ending burning of fossil fuels (and toss in as well phenomena like the melting of Russia’s permafrost, potentially releasing vast amounts of the potent greenhouse-gas methane into the atmosphere).
The World Island ...
Consider us at the edge of the sort of epochal change not seen for centuries, even millennia. By the middle of this century, we will be living under such radically altered circumstances that the present decade, the 2020s, will undoubtedly seem like another era entirely, akin perhaps to the Middle Ages. And I’m not talking about the future development of flying cars, cryogenics, or even as-yet-unimaginable versions of space travel.
After leading the world for the past 75 years, the United States is ever so fitfully losing its grip on global hegemony. As Washington’s power begins to fade, the liberal international system it created by founding the United Nations in 1945 is facing potentially fatal challenges.
After more than 180 years of Western global dominion, leadership is beginning to move from West to East, where Beijing is likely to become the epicenter of a new world order that could indeed rupture longstanding Western traditions of law and human rights.
The new hegemon
Amid this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, Beijing seems to have an underlying design for transcending the vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. Its goal: to forge a unitary market that will soon cover the vast Eurasian land mass. This scheme will consolidate China’s control over a continent that is home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. In the end, it could also break the U.S. geopolitical grip over a region that has long been the core of, and key to, its global power. The foundation for such an ambitious transnational scheme is a monumental construction effort that, in just two decades, has already covered China and much of Central Asia with a massive triad of energy pipelines, high-speed rail lines, and highways.
A short lived hegemon
In its hell-bent drive for development, in other words, China is digging its own grave (and ours as well).
To whit
Simultaneously, soaring temperatures are expected to devastate the North China Plain between Beijing and Shanghai, one of that country’s prime agricultural regions currently inhabited by 400 million people, nearly a third of that country’s population. It could, in fact, potentially become one of the most lethal places on the planet.
“This spot is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat waves in the future,” said Professor Elfatih Eltahir, a climate specialist at MIT who published his findings in the journal Nature Communications. Between 2070 and 2100, he estimates, the region could face hundreds of periods of “extreme danger” and perhaps five lethal periods of 35° Wet Bulb Temperature (where a combination of heat and high humidity prevents the evaporation of the sweat that cools the human body). After just six hours under such conditions, a healthy person at rest will die.
Rather than sudden and catastrophic, the impact of climate change in North China is likely to be incremental and cumulative, escalating relentlessly with each passing decade. If the “Chinese century” does indeed start around 2030, it’s unlikely to last long once its main financial center at Shanghai is flooded out and its agricultural heartland is baking in insufferable heat.
End game.
After 2050, the international community will face a growing contradiction, even a head-on collision, between the two foundational principles of the current world order: national sovereignty and human rights. As long as nations have the sovereign right to seal their borders, the world will have no way of protecting the human rights of the 200 million to 1.2 billion climate-change refugees expected to be created by 2050, both within their own borders and beyond. Faced with such extreme disorder, it is just possible that the nations of this planet might agree to cede some small portion of their sovereignty to a global government set up to cope with the climate crisis.
The choice is up to us if civilization is to survive.
A planet ever more battered by climate change, one in which neither an American nor a Chinese “century” will have any meaning, will certainly need a newly empowered world order that can supersede national sovereignty to protect the most fundamental and transcendent of all human rights: survival. The environmental changes in the offing are so profound that anything less than a new form of democratic global governance will mean not just incessant conflicts but, in all likelihood, disaster of an almost-unimaginable kind. And no surprise there, since we’ll be dealing with a planet all too literally on the brink.
Any questions?
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