Workers Solidarity Movement

There has been an increasing amount of public debate in recent years on the issue of climate change. As the effects of increasing overall global temperatures become difficult to ignore, and climatologists raise their voices in warning, more and more people are asking themselves what exactly is climate change and should we be concerned about it. As the COP23 international climate change talks take place, this article will attempt to answer those questions by briefly exploring the basic concept of climate change as described by the vast majority of climatologists.

At its most basic level climate change simply means a change in overall global weather trends.  This change can be brought about by 'natural' and/or 'artificial' means. Natural climate change occurs as a result of events which are not caused by human beings, and some common examples would be an altered amount of solar energy reaching the earth from the sun, or a series of volcanic eruptions. Artificial or 'anthropogenic' climate change occurs as a result of certain human activities such as the large-scale burning of fossil fuels and practicing specific modes of agriculture.

Thousands of people have converged on Bonn, Germany, for COP23, the annual United Nations summit on climate change. What is COP 23 and why should we care?

Climate change is a global crisis like nothing humans have seen before. COP23 stands for the 23^rd ‘Conference of the Parties’, the 23^rd in a series of similar climate talks. This happens within the UNFCCC or ‘UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’ - basically the UNFCCC is a plan and legal framework to seriously deal with climate change as a global society. The UNFCCC was agreed in 1992 in Brazil and has been built upon each year. It came over 30 years after climate change was given serious international political treatment by the UN in 1961 [1]. The well-known ‘Kyoto Protocol’ was agreed in 1997 at a UNFCCC summit.

Hurricane Ophelia charged across the island of Ireland in October 2017, causing widespread wreckage and even loss of life. This video puts the storm into the context of global human-caused climate change, looking at the pattern rather than the isolated incident.

This is an analysis of events at Woodburn forest (Carrickfergus, County Antrim) during the exploratory drilling operation being carried out by the company Infrastrata in the spring and summer of 2016. It is intended as a reflection on the successes and failures of the campaign to resist a poisonous and violent extraction of resources from the land, and indeed the lease and seizure of some of that land in an aggressive manner. It draws on personal testimonies; both my own and other activists’ experiences of specific direct actions, set within a broader political analysis of the context within which this sort of struggle is taking place, locally and worldwide.

When the Corrib refinery was being built & resisted campaigners warned that environmental legislation was set up to have no meaningful impact on multinationals.  Two days ago we saw a very clear demonstration of this in practise when Shell was fined EUR1,000 of an estimated EUR240 million in Corrib sales so far this year.  Such a fine has no deterrent impact at all, it might as well have been one cent.

Since it's such a nice day, the Labour Party have some good news for you. They'd like to give back all the money they took from those who paid their Irish Water bills. That's quite a turnaround for Fine Gael's junior partner but they say it's because they don't want people "feeling mugged".

The environmental crisis represents ‘one of the gravest and most severe existential threats to our species survival’. International agreements aimed at curbing fossil fuel emissions have largely been a failure, with the most recent Paris CoP21 conference labelled ‘a fraud and a fake’ by leading climatologist and activist James Hansen. Capitalism’s unrelenting assault on the natural environment has pushed us past the point of continuing any pretence of ‘safe carbon mitigation’. It is becoming more widely accepted that we now need a global restructuring of the economic mode of production; capitalism must be dissolved.

On Kildare street this week, two climate activists have been helping inject a taste of sober reality into a week filled with faux-politics and pantomime electioneering. Nils Sundermann and Phil Kearney began a five day hunger strike on Monday in an effort to draw attention to an issue, which whilst one of the most pressing of our times, has failed to make it into the election discussions in any serious way.

In a further confirmation of the empty nature of electoral democracy its been revealed that the Dublin City Council manager wrote to the company building the controversial Poolbeg incinerator to assure them they could ignore the two city council votes against the project. This after a special meeting when 50 out of 52 councillors voted against the proposal!