Will it ever end? It’s still January, but everyone everywhere is tired of the seemingly endless snow. The climate has changed so a situation of frequent storms is now life as we know it. We should embrace the snow and learn to love it instead because what choice do we have?

Watching a news show this morning, they wearily said, “You won’t believe this but another significant snow storm is headed our way. . . .”   Here’s a message for the news media: If you are tired of the snow, and tired of telling people about the snow, then why didn’t you report the truth about climate change when you were first aware of it?  Maybe something could have been done, 20 years ago.   Instead, the news media presented everything as an uncertainty, or a debate, and pretended global warming might be “nothing” as equally as it might be “something” to worry about. Well, now we know it’s “something” for sure, and there is no real debate about that. There are not two opposing sides to the issue of climate change. Yet the news media pretended for years that there was, and now they have to report on a new storm every other day. That will be the repetitive nature of their job from now on, and it will be partially their own fault for not presenting the science long ago.

Why are we getting so much snow?  No, it’s not another “ice age”.  Our freezer is melting.  See the story below for why this is.

Arctic Defrost Dumping Snow on U.S. and Europe

by Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada – The world’s northern freezer is on rapid defrost as large volumes of warm water are pouring into the Arctic Ocean, speeding the melt of sea ice, according to a new study.

The world’s northern freezer is on rapid defrost as large volumes of warm water are pouring into the Arctic Ocean, speeding the melt of sea ice, according to a new study.   Surface temperatures in parts of the Arctic have been 21 degrees C above normal for more than a month in recent weeks.

“Boats were still in the water during the first week of January,” said David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada, referring to southern Baffin Island, some 2,000 km north of Montreal. This is a region that receives just four or five hours of weak sunlight during the long winter. Temperatures normally range from -25 to -35 degrees C but were above zero on some days in January.

“It’s impossible for many people in parts of the eastern Arctic to safely get on the ice to hunt much-needed food for their families – for the second winter in a row,” Phillips said in a report.

The warming and melting of the Arctic is happening much faster than expected and new data reveals that huge volumes of warmer water from the North Atlantic are now flowing into and warming up the [...]

Oil went up another $3 per barrel today. The media would like us to believe this is due to the unrest in Egypt. Does anyone really believe that? It’s a simple and clear fact that oil is running out, and easy to get at oil has already all but run out. We mainly depend these days on dwindling, drying up oil fields, deep-water drilling, and Canadian tar sands oil, and that will be even more the case as time goes on. Interesting that politicians would have us believe that oil is not really running out — the problem according to them is that we get our oil from the Middle East. In fact, the U.S. does not get much of our oil from the Middle East at all, only about 14% these days. That may increase a bit if we go to war with Iran, a development that would be a true disaster in so many ways.

So, the truth is that we reached peak oil as a country in 1974, and the rest of the world is now approaching peak oil too, if it hasn’t already. In response to this reality, The Nation magazine has started a series of videos and information on peak oil, and above is the latest video from one of the biggest peak oil warners, James H. Kunstler.  What can we expect?  He ties it into our (poor) financial health.

“In this fifth video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, author, blogger and social critic James Howard Kunstler opens up on two circumstances he sees running neck and neck “that are going to put us out of business as an advanced industrial civilization”—the “fiasco” in banking, money and finance and the unfolding “energy predicament.” He explains that the crises are really all about “capital” and that we need to look at how wealth has been accumulated and deployed for productive purposes.”  Read more here.

From The Nation:

Peak Oil is the point at which petroleum production reaches its greatest rate just before going into perpetual decline. In “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate,” a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth productions, radio host Thom Hartmann explains that the world will reach peak oil within the next year if it hasn’t already. As a nation, the United States reached peak oil in 1974, after which it became a net oil importer.

This is discussed in the new Climate Files podcast too.

For people who don’t think that climate change will be expensive, they need only to look at the costs of its results in 2010. The grand total of natural disasters below includes earthquakes, which of course are not caused by climate change. But the immense cost of wild weather and that results of that cannot be ignored, especially since they will increase in coming years. In addition to monetary cost, the human cost is also very high.

Natural disasters caused $109 billion in economic damage last year, three times more than in 2009, with Chile and China bearing most of the cost, the United Nations said Monday.

CLIMATE CHANGE [disasters]

The most populous cities on earthquake fault lines include Mexico City, New York, Mumbai, Delhi, Shanghai, Kolkata, Jakarta and Tokyo, according to the U.N.’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

Many people also live in parts of urban areas vulnerable to landslides and floods, which are anticipated to occur more often as a result of climate change, Wahlstrom said, also warning of rising risks from “silent events” like droughts.

… The storms, earthquakes, heatwaves and cold snaps affected 207 million people and killed 296,800, according to the data, which does not incorporate an increase of Haiti’s death toll announced earlier this month by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

The global toll estimates that 55,736 people died from a summer heatwave in Russia which led to crop failures and helped drive up food prices.

It also says 2,968 people were killed in an April earthquake in China and 1,985 died from the Pakistani floods.

The 2009 economic price tag of $34.9 billion was unusually low because of the lack of a major weather or climate event in the period, which nonetheless saw floods and typhoons in Asia and an earthquake in Indonesia.

A major earthquake in China in 2008 caused $86 billion in damage, bringing that year’s economic toll to approximately $200 billion. In 2005, the hurricanes that struck the southern United States drove up the global disaster toll to nearly $250 billion.

The economic cost estimates are based on data from national authorities as well as insurance companies including Swiss Re, Munich Re and Lloyd’s. CRED is part of the University of Louvain in Belgium and maintains a database of international disasters for the United Nations.

We are in the midst of a torrent of information about how hot the world is going to get, and by when, due to human-caused global warming and climate change.   We are also seeing more solid predictions of what the world will be like to live in, in a very short period of time,  due to global warming and climate change.  Warm countries like India will be hardest hit at first and food shortages will soon be a crisis in many countries.  According to the Universal Ecological Fund, these countries are fast approaching a peak food situation.

“The Earth will be 2.4 degree celsius warmer by 2020 if the world continues with the business-as-usual approach to climate change and India would be one of the hardest hit countries witnessing up to 30% reduction in crop yields, a new study has claimed.. . . The rising temperatures will adversely affect the world’s food production and India would be the hardest hit, according to the analysis by the Universal Ecological Fund.

The report titled “The Food Gap — The Impacts of Climate Change on Food Production: A 2020 Perspective” predicted that crop yield in India, the second largest producer of rice and wheat, would fall up to 30% by the end of this decade. The report, however, noted that the impacts of climate change would vary from region to region. While central and southern region would witness adverse impacts, the impacts could be “beneficial” for east and southeast Asia, the report predicted.  [especially if they can move the east and southeast Asia to other planets where they won't have to interact with the rest of the starving world, which may be at war over food and water shortages].

Source: MSN Green/PTI

From the Royal Society:

The analysis within this paper offers a stark and unremitting assessment of the climate change challenge facing the global community. There is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global mean surface temperature at below 2°C, despite repeated high-level statements to the contrary. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between dangerous and extremely dangerous climate change. Consequently, and with tentative signs of global emissions returning to their earlier levels of growth, 2010 represents a political tipping point. The science of climate change allied with emission pathways for Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 nations suggests a profound departure in the scale and scope of the mitigation and adaption challenge from that detailed in many other analyses, particularly those directly informing policy.

This is one reason of several why growing food for ethanol and other fuels is such a terrible idea.  We are going to have to abandon  that very soon.  Below is more of the report from the Royal Society.

Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world

Only if Annex 1 nations reduce emissions immediately at rates far beyond those typically countenanced and only then [...]

It was a pleasant surprise two nights ago, watching CNN International, when the weather person (a non-American) admitted that our weather problems are caused by climate change.  Not sunspots, not natural variabilities, but climate change.  She was adamant about this fact, and sounded rather defiant when she said climate change will have to be addressed.  It was a brief moment and it sounded unplanned.  An even better moment came on ABC News from the previous week, when for the very first time (to my knowledge) a mainstream broadcast U.S. media segment on the weather said very clearly that our wild weather of the past year has been caused by climate change.

The best part of the segment is that they did not turn the report into a false debate on climate change by presenting “the other side” of the story.  That would be the false side.  Every other time climate change has been presented on mainstream U.S. broadcast media, there has always been some ridiculous “climate change denier” giving his or her side of things.  This is a major hurdle that U.S. media seems to have finally gotten over.  They no longer feel the need to present fraudulent, non-scientific information on their news broadcasts.  I don’t think people in other countries can truly appreciate what a major event this is.  Climate Progress wrote about it like this:

Parts of the media are starting to connect the dots — see New York Times front-page story: In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming! Trenberth: “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”

What follows is the Nightline story, which is pretty good, though not as thorough as the ABC evening news story . . . “

You can see the Nightline story here.

A new draft paper by James Hansen of NASA titled, “Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change” has been submitted for publication in the Belgrade Milankovitch Symposium volume — the paper is now under review, and part of it is below.  His message in the introduction is clear — Climate change will develop into the biggest issue of this century.  We have the opportunity to address it now, but the government is not doing that.  In fact, President Obama wrote a bizarre article for the Wall Street Journal stating that his administration will review all government regulations and get rid of those that hurt jobs or place some kind of “burden” on business.  He’s after “outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.” It’s bizarre because of the timing — at the exact moment that the EPA is going to take over greenhouse gas emission regulation because the Congress won’t.  Obama certainly knows that Republicans are already trying to destroy EPA regulations before they start.  Yet he purposely calls out the EPA for bad regulations in the article. The EPA is going to regulate carbon emissions and our president is promising Republicans that he’ll get rid of business-harming regulations. My guess is he means well, but this is going to come back to haunt his EPA. The Republicans will attempt to use his promise to try to halt EPA regulations.  Grit TV talks about it here.

*The video version of this commentary says twenty-two deaths—it is actually twenty-nine.

Hansen’s paper Abstract and Intro  is partially reprinted below, and you can download the entire paper here.

Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change

by James Hansen

ABSTRACT

Milankovic climate oscillations help define climate sensitivity and assess potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods was less than 1°C warmer than in the Holocene and that goals of limiting human-made warming to 2°C and CO2 to 450 ppm are prescriptions for disaster.

Polar warmth in prior interglacials and the Pliocene does not imply that a significant cushion remains between today’s climate and dangerous warming, rather that Earth today is poised to experience strong amplifying polar feedbacks in response to moderate additional warming. Deglaciation, disintegration of ice sheets, is nonlinear, spurred by amplifying feedbacks. If warming reaches a level that forces deglaciation, the rate of sea level rise will depend on the doubling time for ice sheet mass loss. Gravity satellite data, although too brief to be conclusive, are consistent with a doubling time of 10 years or less, implying the possibility of multi-meter sea level rise this century. The emerging shift to accelerating ice sheet mass loss supports our conclusion that Earth’s temperature has returned to at least the Holocene maximum. Rapid reduction of fossil fuel emissions is required for humanity to succeed in preserving a planet resembling the one on which civilization developed.

?1. Introduction
Climate change [...]

Much of America believes that the health problems of Gulf residents are over. Unfortunately, that is not the case.  At present there are serious health problems among many people in Gulf states. The reasons are not clear, but most people apparently  believe it’s from the BP oil or the dispersants, thanks to the oil disaster of last spring.   Below is a recent story about this issue, with a video from last November at a hearing of Gulf residents.  This has been going on for a long time — why isn’t this making the mainstream media?

Cherri Foytlin at the Rally for the Truth about the BP Oil Spill contamination of the gulf seafood supply and effects of dispersant on the people who live there. ~ Grand Isle LA

Full event recorded live: http://mobilebroadcastnews.com/MBN/Gr…

Sick Gulf Residents Beg Officials for Help
Inter Press Service
By Dahr Jamail

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, Jan 14, 2011 (IPS) – In an emotionally charged meeting [last week] sponsored by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, fishermen, Gulf residents and community leaders vented their increasingly grave concerns about the widespread health issues brought on by the three-month-long disaster.

“Today I’m talking to you about my life,” Cherri Foytlin told the two commissioners present at the Jan. 12 meeting. “My ethylbenzene levels are 2.5 times the 95th percentile, and there’s a very good chance now that I won’t get to see my grandbabies…What I’m asking you to do now, if possible, is to amend [your report]. Because we have got to get some health care.”

Ethylbenzene is a form of benzene present in the body when it begins to break down. It is also present in BP’s crude oil.

“I have seen small children with lesions all over their bodies,” Foytlin, co-founder of Gulf Change, a community organisation based in Grand Isle, Louisiana, continued.

“We are very, very ill. And dead is dead. So it really doesn’t matter if the media comes back… or the president hears us, or… if the oil workers and the fishermen and the crabbers get to feed their babies and maybe have a good Christmas next year… Dead is dead…I know your job is probably already done, but I’d like to hire you if you don’t mind. And God knows I can’t pay you. But I need your heart. And I need your voice.”

Toxic Symptoms in the Dispersants:

Many of the chemicals present in the oil and dispersants are known to cause the following health problems:

Headaches, nausea, vomiting, kidney damage, altered renal functions, irritation of the digestive tract, lung damage, burning pain in the nose and throat, coughing, pulmonary edema, cancer, lack of muscle coordination, dizziness, confusion, irritation of the skin, eyes, nose, and throat, difficulty breathing, delayed reaction time, memory difficulties, stomach discomfort, liver and kidney damage, unconsciousness, tiredness/lethargy, irritation of the upper respiratory tract, and hematological disorders.

Commissioner Frances Beinecke, president of [...]

100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists

Edited by Alex Danchev
Penguin, 2011
ISBN 9780141932156

Review in Scotland on Sunday

In this remarkable collection of 100 manifestos from the last 100 years, Alex Danchev presents the contradictory and echoing spirits of such diverse movements as Vorticism, Feminism, Dogme, Surrealism, Communism and Cannibalism, taking in along the way cinema, architecture, fashion and cookery.

Written by a wide range of artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Wyndham Lewis, Claes Oldenburg, Derek Jarman, Gilbert and George, Rem Koolhaas, Werner Herzog, Takashi Murakami and Billy Childish, the revolutionary spirit is clear in each manifesto, as they promote and critique every aspect of Art from fun and fearlessness to violence and freedom.

Tullio Crali. The donation

Casa Depero, Rovereto
November 3, 2010 March 6, 2011

The Mart presents Tullio Crali, a leading exponent of the cultural debate in the years between the two wars. Among the works on show at Casa Depero are some that the artist donated to the museum in 2000.

I Vorticisti: artisti ribelli a Londra e New York, 1914 – 1918
[The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918]

January 29 – May 15, 2011
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Curated by Mark Antliff, Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, Durham, NC, USA, and Vivien Greene, Curator of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art at the Guggenheim Museum New York
Catalog

This exhibit was previously at the Nasher Museum of Art and will be traveling to the Tate Britain in London [June 14 - September 4, 2011].

This is the first exhibition devoted to Vorticism to be presented in Italy. An abstracted figurative style, combining machine-age forms and the focused energy suggested by a vortex, Vorticism was a short-lived, but pivotal modernist movement that emerged in London and roughly spanned the years of World War I. Vorticism’s leaders were painter and writer Wyndham Lewis and poet Ezra Pound. Their mouthpiece was the radical avant-garde magazine Blast. Although Vorticism was born in London, several members were American, including sculptor Jacob Epstein and photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, as well as the important patron, John Quinn. The exhibition emphasizes the group’s Anglo-American connections and is built around the recreation of the three exhibitions the Vorticists mounted during the 1910s; research on these has led to the discovery of lost works and previously unknown material on the movement. Featuring approximately 100 works, comprising paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photography, and printed matter, The Vorticists is coorganized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; and Tate Britain, London.

More info via e-flux

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifestele futurismului

Translation, introduction and notes by Emilia David Drogoreanu
Foreward by Ion Pop Publishing House
Bucharest, November 2009
276 p.
ISBN 978-973-124-412-9

more info

“Why Cecco Beppe Does Not Die” directed by Ben Coonley

Otto vs. the Italian Futurists. A remake of a scene from the lost Futurist omnibus film “Vita Futurista” (1916).

–

Created for “Futurist Life Redux” (2009), a Performa Commission with SFMOMA and Portland Green Cultural Projects

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Original Synopsis (1916): Death (Chiti) comes for Cecco Beppe wearing black clothing with a white skeleton painted on top of it, so that, against the black background, he appears to be a floating mass of bones. But Beppe has a very bad odor–Death cannot stand it and collapses, allowing his victim to live on. This section was never actually shown with the rest of “Vita Futurista,” because it was censored by the Italian Ministry of the Interior.

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Otto the Cat: Otto the Cat
Director: Ben Coonley
Cecco Beppe: Etsa the Cat
Skeletwins: Benjamin & Oliver Giller
Original Music: JD Walsh
Special Assistant to Otto the Cat: Suzanne Fagel
Special Assistant to Etsa the Cat: Alina Simone
Special Assistants to the Skeletwins: Jeremy Giller and Julie Roth

Thank You: Ben Bloodwell, Paul Chan, Jennet Thomas, Paul Tarragó, Lana Wilson, Andrew Lampert

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“Why Cecco Beppe Does Not Die”

Creative Commons License:

Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported

The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910–1918

February 4 – June 1, 2011
*opening February 4 from 7:30 to 11pm, with live music and a cash bar.
Guggenheim (New York)
Curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, and Megan Fontanella, Assistant Curator, Collections and Provenance

Exhibition Unites the Guggenheim Foundation’s Collections in New York and Venice and Illuminates the Spirit of Dynamism and Innovation that Marks the Period before World War I

Featuring More than 100 Paintings, Sculptures, and Works on Paper by Such Avant-Garde Artists as Umberto Boccioni, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, and Pablo Picasso

LECTURE: “Isms” and “Ists”: The Modernist Group in the 1910s
Tuesday, March 15, 6:30 pm
Milton A. Cohen Professor of Literary Studies, University of Texas at Dallas

The 1910s witnessed an explosion of modernist groups. In the visual arts alone, prominent groups included the Italian Futurists, the Parisian Cubists and Orphists, Der Blaue Reiter of Munich, Die Brücke of Berlin, the London Vorticists, and the Russian Rayists. What accounts for this burgeoning? What made groups so appealing to artists in these years? More importantly, was this surge in modernist groups related to the accelerating innovation in all the arts of these years? “Isms and Ists” will address these questions and conclude with examples of how one group in particular, the Italian Futurists, influenced artists from London to Munich to Moscow. Cohen’s essay “Artists Write! Manifestos and Books in 1912” appears in The Great Upheaval exhibition catalogue. Tickets are $10, $7 members, free for students, and are available at guggenheim.org/publicprograms or via the Box Office at 212 423 3587.

A+B+C/F= Futurism
One hundred years of words in freedom: semantics of a movement

December 14, 2010 – March 8, 2011
Guangdong Museum of Art of Canton

Organized jointly by the Guangdong Museum of Art and the City of Alessandria by the Italian Cultural Institute in Beijing and the Consulate General of Italy in Guangzhou

Curated by Sabrina Raffaghello, assistant curator Chen Wei; Artistic director: Luo Yiping

Plans are now being made to take this exhibit to the cities of Hong Kong and Wuhan

RELATED POSTS

A+B+C was previously exhibited in Italy in 2009

Road of Futurism, National Gallery of Art, Bejing

DYNAMICS! Cubism / Futurism / Kinteticism
[DYNAMIK! Kubismus / Futurismus / Kinetismus]

February 10 – May 29, 2011
Lower Belvedere, Vienna

With its show DYNAMICS! Cubism / Futurism / Kineticism, the Belvedere offers a comprehensive insight into abstraction as practiced in Vienna between 1919 and 1929, in the context of European Modernism. The phenomenon of Viennese Kineticism, which has hitherto attracted little attention internationally, is presented alongside masterpieces from all over Europe, including works by František Kupka, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Carlo Carrà, and Giacomo Balla. In the early 1920s, it was particularly the students in Franz Cizek’s class at the Vienna School of Applied Arts who dealt with Cubism and Italian and Russian Futurism – art styles for which, contrary to Paris or Berlin, no tradition had yet been established in Vienna. The exhibition demonstrates how rapidly and innovatively Viennese artists joined in with the European post-war avant-garde during the 1920s.

A joint project by the Belvedere and the Vienna University of Applied Arts.

From Morandi to Guttoso
Masterpieces from the Alberto Della Ragione Collection

January 12 – April 3, 2011
Estorick Collection, London

Containing works by artists including Filippo de Pisis, Fortunato Depero and Giorgio de Chirico, the collection of Alberto Della Ragione provides an extraordinarily comprehensive overview of Italian Modernism.

Saturday, February 12, 2011 – Gallery Talk

Horse Power: Fortunato Depero’s Neighing at Speed and the Horse in Italian Futurism
Bernard Vere, Lecturer, Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Masterpieces From the Alberto Della Regione Collection at the Estorick Collection via ArtDaily

Giacomo Balla, Scritti futuristi
raccolti e curati da Giovanni Lista
Edizioni Abscondita, Milano, 2010
302 pagine

La raccolta degli “scritti futuristi” di Giacomo Balla, mai realizzata prima d’ora, offre una delle principali testimonianze sul significato storico dell’avanguardia futurista. Balla è stato uno dei maggiori protagonisti del futurismo italiano, alla stregua di Marinetti e Boccioni. Ma mentre gli scritti di quest’ultimo sono stati già da tempo oggetto di un’antologia e ampiamente diffusi, quelli di Balla sono rimasti in gran parte sconosciuti. Questa raccolta rinnova la lettura critica della teoria, della storia e della pratica attivistica dell’avanguardia italiana. Permette finalmente di comprendere il ruolo di Giacomo Balla, le sue idee e la sua posizione in seno al movimento futurista, oltre a dargli lo spazio che si merita all’interno delle correnti avanguardistiche del XX secolo.

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The collection of Giacomo Balla’s “futurist writings”, never achieved before, offers one of the main attestations concerning the historical meaning of the futurist avant-garde. Balla has been one of the most important protagonist of Italian futurism, like Marinetti and Boccioni. But while Boccioni’s writings have been the object of an anthology and widely spread for long, Balla’s ones have mostly remained unknown. This collection refreshes the critical reading of the Italian avant-garde theory, history and activist experience. Eventually it enables us to understand Giacomo Balla’s role, ideas and position in the futurist movement, as well as to give him the position he deserves within the avant-gardistic currents of the XXth century.