Well, it’s the end of the year, and also the decade.
Happy New Decade! May 2020 and the next ten years be peaceful and prosperous for all.
Well, it’s the end of the year, and also the decade.
Happy New Decade! May 2020 and the next ten years be peaceful and prosperous for all.
With sadness I note the passing away of Dr. Javid Iqbal today in Lahore, at the age of 91. He was a one-time senior justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and, like his legendary father Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, he was also a philosopher. On a personal note he sent me some kind words on SJ2 a few years ago.
My deepest condolences go out to his family.
Taken just ten minutes ago (3:30 p.m.) for this post. Sleeps like an angel – but only during the day.
Today (actually, as of 6 May) my family has welcomed my brother’s first born child into this world. And so now, as well as being a fan of the one and only M.A. Jinnah, I am also the aunt of his namesake: Jinnah Karim. 🙂
Having observed a 3 day blackout, this site and the SJ2 site are now back to normal.
As I write this the People’s Climate March is underway in Manhattan, New York, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is apparently among the estimated 100,000 people taking to the streets. London’s march earlier today attracted 40,000 people or more; and it’s one of around 2000 marches taking place around the world in this 24-hour period. Attendees are from every walk of life and represent a wide spectrum of groups including charities, environmental groups, farmers, fishermen, scientists, political leaders, popular celebrities, and faith groups, as well as hundreds of thousands of ordinary members of the public.
News agencies have quoted the organisers of the Manhattan event as having said they wanted to transform the climate question from being just “an environmental concern to an ‘everybody issue'”. From the turnout, I’d say they’ve already come a long way in making it so.
Today, as over 4 million people in Scotland cast their votes in a referendum that could drastically change the future shape of the UK, both this site (by which I mean the main Libredux site) and the SJ2 site have begun a “blackout” in support of the upcoming People’s Climate March this Sunday (21 September 2014). If you haven’t done so already, do sign the climate change petition I posted about here recently. Just click on the image.
And if you are reading this, then that means you managed to sneak past this site’s blackout page somehow. Naughty, naughty!
In any case, both sites will be back up again as normal on Sunday evening.
We are fast reaching a crisis point that affects us all, wherever we are. It’s more important than the economy, local or international; it’s more pressing than any war; a greater threat than any government, religious group or financial giant; it matters more than anything happening in any country. It’s the biggest issue of our time, and it affects not only our generation, but future generations as well. In short, it’s a question of life and death for every single person in every single country, and in fact, for every living thing on this planet.
I’m talking, of course, about climate change.
The great tuning out
We’ve all been aware of climate change for a few decades. Many of us, myself included, have been hearing about it since childhood, and more and more often as we grew up. Unfortunately, these days we hear about it so much on the news and through other media that we’re tuning it out, treating it like some annoying advert that we don’t need to hear again and again.
But we do need to hear it. More importantly, we need to act. Immediately.
The well-known social activist site Avaaz.org has described it in these sobering words at their site and by email:
Scientist Julienne Stroeve has studied Arctic ice for decades. Every summer she travels to north to measure how much ice has melted. She knows that climate change is melting the ice fast, but a recent trip surprised even her. Vast areas of Arctic ice have disappeared, beyond our worst expectations.
This is what the experts warned us about. As the earth warms, it creates many “tipping points” that accelerate the warming out of control. Warming thaws the Arctic sea ice, destroying the giant white ‘mirror’ that reflects heat back into space, which massively heats up the ocean, and melts more ice, and so on. We spin out of control. In 2013 everything — storms, temperatures — was off the charts.
Scientists are screaming from the rooftops that climate change isn’t just a bit of warming and some more storms. No exaggeration, our actual *survival* is at risk — this is a fight to save the world.
UN Emergency Meeting
The situation is serious enough that the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has arranged an emergency Climate Summit at the UN New York headquarters to be held on 23 September 2014. Social activist groups such as 350.org and Avaaz.org are already in the process of rallying ordinary people across the world to collectively call for affirmative action before it’s too late. They will be part of an international People’s Climate March on 21 September.
Add your voice
The ultimate aim of the march is to deliver a petition calling for the international community to make a concerted move away from dirty fuels like oil and coal, to 100% clean energy sources. If you think this sounds unfeasible, consider this: 20% of the world’s electricity is already generated from renewable sources, and solar power is now cheaper than coal in many countries, including the USA and Australia (in the case of the latter, consumer choice in favour of cheaper solar has made coal entirely unprofitable, prompting a British newspaper to declare: “Solar has won“). While this is all good news, we need to push for more.
The petition will be delivered to leaders at the summit, and it needs to have as many signatures as possible to make a positive impact. Avaaz has set up its petition online with a target of getting at least 3 million signatures. To add your voice, sign it here:
To help spread the word, you can share this post through the usual social media channels or email, simply by clicking the big “share” button at the bottom of this post.
This is not a climate change petition. This is the climate change petition. So make the call to save our planet. We have to.
Link to this post:
Further reading:
Noam Chomsky | Owl of Minerva’s View: ISIS and Our Times
Postscript: This site and the Secular Jinnah site will be observing a “blackout” in the days just before the summit. This post will display at both sites’ home pages to help raise awareness.
Today is your last chance to get 15% off Khurram Ali Shafique’s new book, Iqbal: His Life and Our Times. Order directly from this page (https://www.createspace.com/4780451) and use the code in red at checkout to qualify. Offer ends tonight at 8 p.m. (British time).
This is just to let you all know that I’m taking some time off from the blog. In fact my online activity is necessarily going to be minimal for a while. Can’t say when I’ll be back, but I will be eventually.
To those of you who are subscribed to this blog, do you find that you only receive email updates sporadically? I subscribed to my own blog to check some time ago, and I’m pretty sure that most of the time I don’t get any update messages from here.
Let’s see if the blog notifies subscribers about this post, shall we?
Btw, this is really a test post made to see if it shows up on my Facebook page (owing to some long-term technical difficulties). The subscribers’ question is real enough, but really I just needed an excuse to post!