Dahr Jamail – Dire Warnings about Climate Change
Dahr Jamail is an award-winning journalist and mountaineer who reports on human-caused climate disruption and the environment for Truthout. Prior to joining the climate beat, he was one of the few un-embedded journalists to report extensively from Iraq during the occupation following the 2003 Invasion of that country. His reporting and consequent books would garner praise from Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, who declared him “the conscience of American war reporting” and Howard Zinn who called Jamail “a superb journalist, in the most honorable tradition of the craft.” He would report from Iraq and other places in the Middle East—including Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan—for over ten years. Prior to becoming a journalist, Jamail worked as a mountain guide and volunteer rescuer with the National Park Service at Denali National Park in Alaska. He has summited Denali multiple times and his climbs include summits in Argentina, Pakistan, and Mexico among others. Jamail is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket, 2007). His stories have been published with Truthout, The Guardian, The Independent, Foreign Policy in Focus, Tom Dispatch, The Huffington Post, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, among others. He is a frequent guest on Democracy Now! and has appeared on BBC and NPR, among numerous other outlets. Jamail was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Investigative Journalism in 2007 for his work in Iraq, and in 2018 won an Izzy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Media for his reporting on climate disruption. He lives in a solar-powered house in Washington State.
Here he warns us – this is the scary presentation – thank you for being here for this. This is why we need to work so hard, now, on all the awesome stuff we’ve been looking at for solutions. It’s still important to get a baseline of what we’re really looking at – and then get active locally to make a global change.
Since the Iraq war ended, he’s been traveling the planet interviewing, getting involved and hearing stories from scientists and indigenous leaders about climate change and ecosystem degradation – two phenomena that go hand in hand with human misuse of land and resources.
The truth, according to his research, is that some amount of catastrophic climate change is “baked in” to the system at this point and regardless of what we do to curb emissions, we will experience drastic effects in the coming decades, or longer if we don’t act quickly. While this work focuses primarily on ecosystem loss as a result of climate change, presumably from excessive fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from industry, he also mentioned and we also know that habitat degradation from land misuse also releases greenhouse gases, that again perpetuate the climate change cycle. It’s a vicious circle!
We still believe that, combined with energy technology changes to reduce fossil fuels, ecosystem restoration is the strongest tool we have to reduce the effects of climate change now and this will create more resilience for humans and ecosystems in the coming years.
Thank you for your work, Dahr! Thank you for watching, folks! Please check out Dahr Jamail’s website here (http://dahrjamail.net) and if you like what we do getting these videos out there, support us here. (http://patreon.com/globalearthrepair)
In his new book The End of Ice, Dahr Jamail journeys to the world’s “hot spots”—locations experiencing the most dramatic impacts of climate disruption—as he climbs and dives alongside some of the leading experts studying these locales, investigating what lies ahead for the planet, and for us.
