Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Nathan Waddell, Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century Literature, University of Birmingham

George Orwell had a traumatic relationship with the sea. In August 1947, while he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) on the island of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides, he went on a fishing trip with his young son, nephew and niece.

Having misread the tidal schedules, on the way back Orwell mistakenly piloted the boat into rough swells. He was pulled into the fringe of the Corryvreckan whirlpool off the coasts of Jura and Scarba. The boat capsized and Orwell and his relatives were thrown overboard.

It was a close call – a fact recorded with characteristic detachment by Orwell in his diary that same evening: “On return journey today ran into the whirlpool & were all nearly drowned.” Though he seems to have taken the experience in his stride, this may have been a trauma response: detachment ensures the ability to persist after a near-death experience.

We don’t know for sure if Nineteen Eighty-Four was influenced by the Corryvreckan incident. But it’s clear that the novel was written by a man fixated on water’s terrifying power.

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This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four isn’t typically associated with fear of death by water. Yet it’s filled with references to sinking ships, drowning people and the dread of oceanic engulfment. Fear of drowning is a torment that social dissidents might face in Room 101, the torture chamber to which all revolutionaries are sent in the appropriately named totalitarian state of Oceania.

An early sequence in the novel describes a helicopter attack on a ship full of refugees, who are bombed as they fall into the sea. The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, has a recurring nightmare in which he dreams of his long-lost mother and sister trapped “in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water”.

The sight of them “drowning deeper every minute” takes Winston back to a culminating moment in his childhood when he stole chocolate from his mother’s hand, possibly condemning his sister to starvation. These watery graves imply that Winston is drowning in guilt.

The “wateriness” of Nineteen Eighty-Four may have another interesting historical source. In his essay My Country Right or Left (1940), Orwell recalls that when he had just become a teenager he read about the “atrocity stories” of the first world war.

Orwell states in this same essay that “nothing in the whole war moved [him] so deeply as the loss of the Titanic had done a few years earlier”, in 1912. What upset Orwell most about the Titanic disaster was that in its final moments it “suddenly up-ended and sank bow foremost, so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than 300 feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss”.

Sinking ships and dying civilisations

Orwell never forgot this image. Something similar to it appears in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) where the idea of a sinking passenger liner evokes the collapse of modern civilisation, just as the Titanic disaster evoked the end of Edwardian industrial confidence two decades beforehand.

References to sinking ships and drowning people appear at key moments in many other works by Orwell, too. But did the full impact of the Titanic surface in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Sinking ships were part of Orwell’s descriptive toolkit. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel driven by memories of unsympathetic water, they convey nightmares. Filled with references to water and liquidity, it’s one of the most aqueous novels Orwell produced, relying for many of its most shocking episodes on imagery of desperate people drowning or facing imminent death on sinking sea craft.

The thought of trapped passengers descending into the depths survives in Winston’s traumatic memories of his mother and sister, who, in the logic of his dreams, are alive inside a sinking ship’s saloon.

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There’s no way to prove that the Nineteen Eighty-Four is “about” the Titanic disaster, but in the novel, and indeed in Orwell’s wider body of work, there are too many tantalising hints to let the matter rest.

Thinking about fear of death by water takes us into Orwell’s terrors just as it takes us into Winston’s, allowing readers to see the frightened boy inside the adult man and, indeed, inside the author who dreamed up one of the 20th century’s most famous nightmares.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Nathan Waddell’s suggestion:

As soon as the news broke of the Titanic’s sinking, literary works of all shapes and sizes started to appear in tribute to the disaster and its victims. As the century went on, and as research into the tragedy developed (particularly after the ships wreckage was discovered in 1985), more nuanced literary responses to the sinking became possible.

One such response is Beryl Bainbridge’s Whitbread-prize-winning novel Every Man for Himself (1996). It reimagines the disaster from the first-person perspective of an imaginary character, Morgan, the fictional nephew of the historically real financier J. P. Morgan (who was due to sail on the Titanic but changed plans before it sailed).

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Nathan Waddell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Nineteen Eighty-Four might have been inspired by George Orwell’s fear of drowning – https://theconversation.com/nineteen-eighty-four-might-have-been-inspired-by-george-orwells-fear-of-drowning-251289

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Davide Foffa, Research Fellow in Palaeobiology, University of Birmingham

Ever since the first fragments of pterosaur bone surfaced nearly 250 years ago, palaeontologists have puzzled over one question: how did these close cousins of land-bound dinosaurs take to the air and evolve powered flight? The first flying vertebrates seemed to appear on the geological stage fully formed, leaving almost no trace of their first tentative steps into the air.

Taken at face value, the fossil record implies that pterosaurs suddenly originated in the later part of the Triassic period (around 215 million years ago), close to the equator on the northern super-continent Pangaea. They then spread quickly between the Triassic and the Jurassic periods, about 10 million years later, in the wake of a mass extinction that was most likely caused by massive volcanic activity.

Most of the handful of Triassic specimens come from narrow seams of dark shale in Italy and Austria, with other fragments discovered in Greenland, Argentina and the southwestern US. These skeletons appear fully adapted for flight, with a hyper-elongated fourth finger supporting membrane-wings. Yet older rocks show no trace of intermediate gliders or other transitional forms that you might expect as evidence of pterosaurs’ evolution over time.

There are two classic competing explanations for this. The literal reading says pterosaurs evolved elsewhere and did not reach those regions where most have been discovered until very late in the Triassic period, by which time they were already adept flyers. The sceptical reading notes that pterosaurs’ wafer-thin, hollow bones could easily vanish from the fossil record, dissolve, get crushed or simply be overlooked, creating this false gap.

For decades, the debate stalled as a result of too few fossils or too many missing rocks. This impasse began to change in 2020, when scientists identified the closest relatives of pterosaurs in a group of smallish upright reptiles called lagerpetids.

From comparing many anatomical traits across different species, the researchers established that pterosaurs and lagerpetids shared many similarities including their skulls, skeletons and inner ears. While this discovery did not bring any “missing link” to the table, it showed what the ancestor of pterosaurs would have looked like: a rat-to-dog-sized creature that lived on land and in trees.

This brought new evidence about when pterosaurs may have originated. Pterosaurs and lagerpetids like Scleromochlus, a small land-dwelling reptile, diverged at some point after the end-Permian mass extinction. It occurred some 250 million years ago, 35 million years before the first pterosaur appearance in the fossil record.

Pterosaurs and their closest kin did not share the same habitats, however. Our new study, featuring new fossil maps, shows that soon after lagerpetids appeared (in southern Pangaea), they spread across wide areas, including harsh deserts, that many other groups were unable to get past. Lagerpetids lived both in these deserts and in humid floodplains.

They tolerated hotter, drier settings better than any early pterosaur, implying that they had evolved to cope with extreme temperatures. Pterosaurs, by contrast, were more restricted. Their earliest fossils cluster in the river and lake beds of the Chinle and Dockum basins (southwest US) and in moist coastal belts fringing the northern arm of the Tethys Sea, a huge area that occupied today’s Alps.

Scientists have inferred from analysing a combination of fossil distributions, rock features and climate simulations that pterosaurs lived in areas that were warm but not scorching. The rainfall would have been comparable to today’s tropical forests rather than inland deserts.

This suggests that the earliest flying dinosaurs may have lived in tree canopies, using foliage both for take-off and to protect themselves from predators and heat. As a result of this confined habitat, the distances that they flew may have been quite limited.

Changing climates

We were then able to add a fresh dimension to the story using a method called ecological niche modelling. This is routinely used in modern conservation to project where endangered animals and plants might live as the climate gets hotter. By applying this approach to later Triassic temperatures, rainfall and coastlines, we asked where early pterosaurs lived, regardless of whether they’ve shown up there in the fossil record.

Many celebrated fossil sites in Europe emerge as poor pterosaur habitat until very late in the Triassic period: they were simply too hot, too dry or otherwise inhospitable before the Carnian age, around 235 million years ago. The fact that no specimens have been discovered there that are more than about 215 million years old may be because the climate conditions were still unsuitable or simply because we don’t have the right type of rocks preserved of that age.

In contrast, parts of the south-western US, Morocco, India, Brazil, Tanzania and southern China seem to have offered welcoming environments several million years earlier than the age of our oldest discoveries. This rewrites the search map. If pterosaurs could have thrived in those regions much more than 215 million years ago, but we have not found them there, the problem may again lie not with biology but with geology: the right rocks have not been explored, or they preserve fragile fossils only under exceptional conditions.

Our study flags a dozen geological formations, from rivers with fine sediment deposits to lake beds, as potential prime targets for the next breakthrough discovery. They include the Timezgadiouine beds of Morocco, the Guanling Formation of south-west China and, in South America, several layers of rock from the Carnian age, such as the Santa Maria Formation, Chañares Formation and Ischigualasto Formation.

Pterosaurs were initially confined to tropical treetops near the equator. When global climates shifted and forested corridors opened, pterosaurs’ wings catapulted them into every corner of the planet and ultimately carried them through one of Earth’s greatest extinctions. What began as a tale of missing fossils has become a textbook example of how climate, ecology and evolutionary science have come together to illuminate a fragmentary history that has intrigued paleontologists for over two centuries.

Davide Foffa is funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions: Individual (Global) Fellowship (H2020-MSCA-IF-2020; No.101022550), and by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851–Science Fellowship

Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza receives funding from The Royal Society (Newton International Fellowship NIFR1231802)

Emma Dunne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How pterosaurs learned to fly: scientists have been looking in the wrong place to solve this mystery – https://theconversation.com/how-pterosaurs-learned-to-fly-scientists-have-been-looking-in-the-wrong-place-to-solve-this-mystery-259063

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Shannon Bosch, Associate Professor (Law), Edith Cowan University

Israel’s major military operation against Iran has targeted its nuclear program, including its facilities and scientists, as well as its military leadership.

In response, the United Nations Security Council has quickly convened an emergency sitting. There, the Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon defended Israel’s actions as a “preventative strike” carried out with “precision, purpose, and the most advanced intelligence”. It aimed, he said, to:

dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme, eliminate the architects of its terror and aggression and neutralise the regime’s ability to follow through on its repeated public promise to destroy the state of Israel.

So, what does international law say about self-defence? And were Israel’s actions illegal under international law?

When is self-defence allowed?

Article 2.4 of the UN charter states:

All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

There are only two exceptions:

1. when the UN Security Council authorises force, and
2. when a state acts in self-defence.

This “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence”, as article 51 of the UN charter puts it, persists until the Security Council acts to restore international peace and security.

So what’s ‘self-defence’ actually mean?

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has consistently interpreted self-defence narrowly.

In many cases, it has rejected arguments from states such as the United States, Uganda and Israel that have sought to promote a more expansive interpretation of self-defence.

The 9/11 attacks marked a turning point. The UN Security Council affirmed in resolutions 1368 and 1373 that the right to self-defence extends to defending against attacks by non-state actors, such as terrorist groups. The US, invoking this right, launched its military action in Afghanistan.

The classic understanding of self-defence – that it’s justified when a state responds reactively to an actual, armed attack – was regarded as being too restrictive in the age of missiles, cyberattacks and terrorism.

This helped give rise to the idea of using force before an imminent attack, in anticipatory self-defence.

The threshold for anticipatory self-defence is widely seen by scholars as high. It requires what’s known as “imminence”. In other words, this is the “last possible window of opportunity” to act to stop an unavoidable attack.

As set out by then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2005:

as long as the threatened attack is imminent, no other means would deflect it and the action is proportionate, this would meet the accepted interpretation of self defence under article 51.

As international law expert Donald Rothwell points out, the legitimacy of anticipatory self-defence hinges on factual scrutiny and strict criteria, balancing urgency, legality and accountability.

However, the lines quickly blurred

In 2002, the US introduced a “pre-emptive doctrine” in its national security strategy.

This argued new threats – such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction – justified using force to forestall attacks before they occurred.

Critics, including Annan, warned that if the notion of preventive self-defence was widely accepted, it would undermine the prohibition on the use of force. It would basically allow states to act unilaterally on speculative intelligence.

Annan acknowledged:

if there are good arguments for preventive military action, with good evidence to support them, they should be put to the Security Council, which can authorise such action if it chooses to.

If it does not so choose, there will be, by definition, time to pursue other strategies, including persuasion, negotiation, deterrence and containment – and to visit again the military option.

This is exactly what Israel has failed to do before attacking Iran.

Lessons from history

Israel’s stated goal was to damage Iran’s nuclear program and prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon that could be used against it.

This is explicitly about preventing an alleged, threatened, future attack by Iran with a nuclear weapon that, according to all publicly available information, Iran does not currently possess.

This is not the first time Israel has advanced a broad interpretation of self-defence.

In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, which was under construction on the outskirts of Baghdad. It claimed a nuclear-armed Iraq would pose an unacceptable threat. The UN Security Council condemned the attack.

As international law stands, unless an armed attack is imminent and unavoidable, such strikes are likely to be considered unlawful uses of force.

While there is still time and opportunity to use non-forcible means to prevent the threatened attack, there’s no necessity to act now in self defence.

Diplomatic engagement, sanction, and international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program – such as through the International Atomic Energy Agency – remain the lawful means of addressing the emerging threat posed by Tehran.

Preserving the rule of law

The right to self-defence is not a blank cheque.

Anticipatory self-defence remains legally unsettled and highly contested.

So were Israel’s attacks on Iran a legitimate use of “self-defence”? I would argue no.

I concur with international law expert Marko Milanovic that Israel’s claim to be acting in preventive self-defence must be rejected on the facts available to us.

In a volatile world, preserving these legal limits is essential to avoiding unchecked aggression and preserving the rule of law.

Shannon Bosch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Are Israel’s actions in Iran illegal? Could it be called self-defence? An international law expert explains – https://theconversation.com/are-israels-actions-in-iran-illegal-could-it-be-called-self-defence-an-international-law-expert-explains-259259

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Cameron Shackell, Sessional Academic, School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology

Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential works.

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most original and imaginative thinkers of postwar France. A lifelong teacher, he spent most of his career at the University of Paris VIII, influencing generations of students but largely shunning the mantle of public intellectual.

His complex, creative books mix philosophy, literature, film and politics – not to give clear answers, but to spark new ways of thinking.

Postscript on the Societies of Control, published 35 years ago in the countercultural L’Autre Journal is Deleuze at his most accessible and prophetic.

Written at a time when the Cold War was ending, computers were becoming more common, and the internet was beginning to connect institutions, the essay describes the emergence of a new kind of society – one not ruled by a single stern voice but by the soft hum of networks.

How societies work

Postscript was written as an update to the work of Deleuze’s contemporary Michel Foucault, who had died in 1984. Deleuze called it a “postscript” not just because of its brevity (it’s only around 2,300 words in English translation) but to highlight he wasn’t refuting Foucault, just building on his work.

From the 18th to early 20th centuries, Foucault had argued, Western societies were “disciplinary societies”. Schools, factories, prisons and hospitals – institutions with walls, schedules, routines and clear expectations – moulded behaviour. People were trained, observed, tested and corrected as they passed from one institution to the next.

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Read more:
‘A dark masterpiece’: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish at 50

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But in the late 20th century, Deleuze saw something shifting. He thought the stodgy old disciplinary institutions were “in a generalized crisis” due to technological advances and a new form of capitalism that demanded more flexibility in workers and consumers.

New systems of management and technology were starting to reshape people without sending them through traditional institutions. Deleuze wrote presciently, for example, that “perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination”.

In business, he saw a growing idea of “salary according to merit”, transforming work into “challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions” – something much at odds with the old model of the standard wage and the assembly line. Traditional government institutions like hospitals and the classic factory were embracing the model of the corporation, driven always by a profit motive and the need for better human tools.

To Deleuze, all this meant people were becoming more “free-floating” – they could be still playing socially useful roles but were being gently steered into them. This greater freedom, however, required a new system to keep everyone in line. He called this “modulation” to underline its dynamic, enveloping nature.

Like nudging, but everywhere

Deleuze described modulation as “a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other”. He meant that people were beginning to live in an environment where everything shape-shifts to encourage or discourage us in the right direction without explicitly putting up walls.

A prime example of how modulation has since become commonplace is nudging – the use of psychological techniques, often subtle and data-driven, to shape people’s behaviour.

Nudging didn’t really exist in 1990, but governments and tech companies use nudges all the time now. We’re nudged to eat healthier, buy, save, recycle, donate. Web sites use “dark patterns” – tricky designs that steer (or nudge) us toward certain choices. Social media feeds use algorithms to exclude us if we say the wrong thing. In fact, entire teams of behavioural scientists operate behind the scenes to manipulate many aspects of our lives.

Nudges can be good and can save us from poor choices, but their newfound moral acceptability (sometimes called libertarian paternalism) is very much a clue that Deleuze’s control society has arrived.

Control in your pocket

Deleuze, who died in 1995, wrote Postscript before the advent of the smartphone, but he foresaw that an “electronic collar” would assume a central role in society. He envisaged a “computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation.”

Smartphones more than fit the bill. In the old disciplinary ways, they track where we go, what we search for, what we buy, how many steps we take, even how well we sleep. But if we apply Deleuze’s ideas to these phones, detailed surveillance is no longer their most important function. Our phones present and curate options.

In effect, they shape how we see the world. When you scroll through news or social media, for instance, you’re reading about a version of the world built just for you, designed to keep you looking, clicking and reacting – and keep you very finely attuned to what is acceptable or dangerous behaviour.

In Deleuze’s terms, this is pure modulation: not a forceful “No” but a softly spoken, “How about this?” Your phone doesn’t lock you in – it draws you in. It shapes what you see, rewards your cooperation, ignores your silence, and always keeps score. And it does this 24/7. You might unlock it hundreds of times a day. And each time it’s updated to guide your next move more precisely.

At the same time our phones quietly turn us into a set of credentials useful for regulating physical access to workplaces, bank accounts, information: In the societies of control, writes Deleuze, “what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password.”

Data points not people?

Deleuze warned that, in a control society: “Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses have become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’” A dividual to Deleuze is a person transformed into a set of data points and metrics.

You are your credit rating, your search history, your likes and clicks – a different dataset to every institution. Such fragments are used to make decisions about you until they effectively replace you. In fact, for Deleuze a dividual has internalised this treatment and thinks of themselves as a net worth, a mortgage size, a car value – psychological anchors for control.

He illustrates this point with healthcare, predicting a

new medicine ‘without doctor or patient’ that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation.

How many health decisions are now made for us collectively before we ever see a doctor? We should be grateful for advances in public health and epidemiology, but this has certainly impacted our individuality and how we are treated.

Hard to detect

An unsettling part of Deleuze’s perspective is that control doesn’t usually feel like control. It’s often dressed up as convenience, efficiency or progress. You set up internet-linked video cameras because then you can work from home. You agree to long terms and conditions because your banking app won’t work otherwise.

One problem is there are no longer clear barriers we can rail against. As Deleuze said:

In disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in control societies one is never finished with anything.

Control doesn’t always crush – it can enable. Digital networks bring real freedom, economic possibility, even joy. We move more easily – both mentally and geographically – than ever before. But while we move, it always inside a kind of invisible map shaped by capitalism.

It’s no conspiracy because nobody has the whole map. So it’s difficult to work out exactly what action, if any, to take. As Deleuze concludes: “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”

So what can we do?

Postscript doesn’t offer a political program beyond the sardonic comment that:

Many young people strangely boast of being ‘motivated’ […] It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve.

There are ways to resist control. Some people demand more privacy or digital rights. Others opt out selectively – logging off, turning off, refusing to be nudged. Some look to art as a way of resisting its smooth grip. These acts – however small – may offer what Deleuze and his collaborator, the French psychiatrist and philosopher Félix Guattari, called lines of flight: creative ways to move not just against control, but beyond it.

The real message of Postscript, however, is its invitation to consider a timeless perspective. Any society must have a way to make people useful. So, what kind of society do we want? What kinds of restrictions are we willing to live under? And, crucial to this current age, how explicit should control be?

Cameron Shackell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Computers tracking us, an ‘electronic collar’: Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 Postscript on the Societies of Control was eerily prescient – https://theconversation.com/computers-tracking-us-an-electronic-collar-gilles-deleuzes-1990-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control-was-eerily-prescient-254579

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Philip Fearnside, Biólogo e pesquisador titular (Departamento de Ecologia), Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA)

A bill essentially abolishing Brazil’s environmental licensing system is just days away from likely passage by the country’s National Congress. Despite the environmental discourse of President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, what is known as the “bill of devastation” (PL 2159/2021) apparently has his tacit approval. Even if Lula vetoes the bill, anti-environmental voting blocks in the National Congress have more than the 60% in each house needed to override a veto.

The “bill of devastation” has been promoted as relieving “low impact” projects of unnecessary bureaucracy, but it is very much more than this. First, it is for both “low” and “medium” impact projects, two categories that are vaguely defined, allowing projects with major impacts to be benefitted. The bill applies to licensing at both the state and federal levels, and at the state level there is expected to be a “race to the bottom” as states compete to attract investments by loosening environmental restrictions.

The “medium impact” category is a misnomer, as it includes most mining projects such as the mine tailings dams that broke in 2015 at Mariana and in 2019 at Brumadinho to create two of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters.

Under the bill, these “low” and “medium” impact projects would be licensed by what is known as “self-licensing,”. This eliminates the need for an environmental impact assessment, public hearings and specification of compensatory measures in the event of accidents or other impacts. Basically, this self-declared statement consists of checking a series of boxes on an online form.

Bypassing any public or committee debate, at the last minute before the Senate’s plenary vote the bill was modified with an amendment that increased its environmental impact even more. The amendment created a “Special Environmental License” that would allow any project considered to be “strategic” to have an accelerated approval process, regardless of the magnitude of its impacts.

The amendment is believed to be specifically intended to facilitate the controversial mouth-of-the-Amazon oil project, which has major potential impacts both from potentially uncontrollable oil spills and from its impact on climate change.

Brazil’s imminent climate disaster

Global climate and the Amazon forest are both approaching tipping points where the process of collapse escapes from human control. These imminent disasters are intertwined: if the Amazon forest were to collapse it would release more than enough greenhouse gases to push global temperatures beyond the point where human society loses the option to contain climate change by cutting emissions to zero, and if global temperatures rise uncontrollably, it would soon push the Amazon forest to collapse.

The Amazon forest is on the verge of tipping points in terms of temperature, the ongoing increase in dry season length, the percentage of forest cleared and a combination of various climatic and direct anthropogenic impacts.

The loss of the Amazon forest that would result from crossing any of these tipping points would, among other impacts, sacrifice the forest’s vital role in recycling water.

A volume of water greater than the Amazon River’s total flow is released as water vapor by the leaves of the trees, providing rainfall that not only maintains Amazon forest but also maintains agriculture and city water supplies in other parts of Brazil and in neighboring countries. The water vapor is transported by winds known as “flying rivers” to São Paulo, the World’s fourth largest city, which depends on this water supply.

Amazon destruction

Given these catastrophic prospects, Brazil’s government should be acting decisively to halt the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and to lead the World in combatting climate change. These necessities are interrelated, as effective leadership is done through example and Brazil cannot continue to merely exhort other countries to reduce their emissions when its domestic decisions are acting to increase global warming. This includes the “bill of devastation”.

Rapidly phasing out fossil fuel use is fundamental to containing global warming. The amount by which human society must reduce its emissions and the trajectory in time that this reduction must follow are determined by analysis of the best available data and climate models.

The “Global Stocktake” by the Climate Convention, released at COP-28 in 2023, showed that anthropogenic emissions must decline by 43% by 2030 compared to 2023, and by 84% by 2050 to stay within the limit currently agreed under the Paris Agreement of 1.5 ºC above the pre-industrial average global temperature.

This limit represents a tipping point both for the global climate system and for the Amazon forest. Above this point there is a sharp increase in the annual probability of uncontrollable feedbacks driving the system to a catastrophic shift or collapse.

The mouth-of-the-Amazon project is critical. A massive auction of drilling rights, both onshore and offshore, is scheduled for 17 June, including 47 blocks in the mouth of the Amazon River.

Environmental approval of the first “experimental” well (FZA-M-59) is viewed as the key to international oil companies being willing to bid on these blocks. The head of the Brazilian licensing agency (IBAMA) has been under intense pressure to approve the project.

Oil project

Within the licensing debate, the focus is almost entirely on whether Petrobras has the infrastructure and personnel to mount a rescue operation for marine wildlife in the event of an oil spill, rather than the more basic question of whether a leak could be plugged if it should occur.

Unfortunately, there are strong indications that a leak could not be plugged for months or years, as the site has double the 1.5-km water depth at the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico that spilled uncontrollably for five months in 2010, and the ocean currents are much stronger and more complex in the mouth of the Amazon.

Petrobras constantly brags about its long experience with offshore oil extraction, but neither Petrobras nor any other company has plugged a leak at a location with the depth and complexity of the mouth-of-the-Amazon site.

Containing global warming is inconsistent with opening new oil fields due to the economic logic of these projects, which is different from the economics of continued extraction of existing oilfields. This is what led the International Energy Agency (IEA) to recommend that no new oil or gas fields be opened anywhere in the World.

In the case of the mouth of the Amazon project, the expectation is that it would take five years to begin commercial production and another five years to pay for the investment; since no one will want to stop with zero profit, the project implies extracting petroleum for many years after that – far beyond the time when the World must stop using oil as fuel.

Petrobras claims that the mouth-of-the-Amazon project and other planned new oilfields are needed for Brazil’s “energy security” to guarantee that Brazilians will not lack fuel for their vehicles.

The falsity of this argument is obvious from the fact that Brazil currently exports over half of the oil it extracts, and this percentage is expected to rise with the planned expansion. The reserves in Brazil’s existing oilfields are far greater than what the country can consume before fossil-fuel use must cease. In other words, the expansion of oil extraction is purely a matter of money.

Another argument promoted by Petrobras and by President Lula is that the oil revenue is needed to pay for Brazil’s energy transition. While the energy transition must indeed be paid for, it should have a guaranteed place in Brazil annual budget, like health and education, and not be treated as something optional that depends on windfall financial gains.

President Lula’s sleepwalk

President Lula apparently lacks understanding of Brazil’s suicidal course towards a climate catastrophe. He has surrounded himself with proponents of projects with enormous climatic consequences, such as his minister of transportation who presses for Highway BR-319 and his minister of mines and energy and the president of Petrobras who push for the mouth-of-the-Amazon and other new oil and gas projects.

Clearly, Lula does not listen to his minister of environment and climate change on these issues. He lives in a “disinformation space,” to use the term coined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinski to describe Donald Trump. The question of whether President Lula will awake from his sleepwalk before COP-30 in November is critical, as this is his opportunity to assume global leadership on climate change. Although there is no indication that this is likely, efforts to penetrate his disinformation space must continue.

Philip Fearnside receives funding from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), the Amazonas State Research Support Foundation (FAPEAM), and the Brazilian Research Network on Global Climate Change (Rede Clima).

– ref. Brazil’s ‘bill of devastation’ pushes Amazon towards tipping point – https://theconversation.com/brazils-bill-of-devastation-pushes-amazon-towards-tipping-point-259027