A socialist for Minneapolis city council

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Here in Minneapolis, students and pro­ fessors have returned to class, the temper­ atures are plummeting, and the leaves on the trees are changing from green to red. That can only mean one thing, election season is here again, but this time around, it looks to be a lot more interesting.

Ty Moore is running in the 9th ward of the Minneapolis city council on the So­ cialist Alternative ticket. The campaign has been endorsed by many prominent local activists, the SEIU Minnesota State Council, and the Green Party. Moore has been on the front line of the Occupy Homes struggle, a movement that has successfully stopped several evictions with mass actions and civil disobedi­ ence—one of which he was arrested at.

While there is certainly nothing new about socialist electoral campaigns, this one has been getting a lot of buzz in the local papers. Moore and his campaign stand on the shoulders of another Socialist Alternative candidate, Kshama Sawant, in Seattle. In last year’s elections, Sawant received over 20,000 votes (29%) against House Democratic incumbent Frank Chopp, which was not only the larg­ est number of votes an openly socialist campaign had won in Seattle in decades but also the greatest electoral challenge Chopp had received in all the 18 years he was in office. But even those figures pale in comparison to those in the August elec­ tions of this year, when Sawant won over 44,000 votes (35%) in a three-way race (continued from page 12: “Climate change panel reports global warming is ‘unequivocal’”) of the warming that has occurred since 1980. Its heat content is two times that of the lower layer located 700 to 2000 meters down.

Over the last decade, the upper layer has warmed more slowly. This apparent slowdown is closely related to the global surface temperature because the temper­ ature of the overlying atmosphere is strongly linked to that of the ocean surface. The reduced warming of the ocean’s upper layer is due not to less heat from above but rather, greater heat loss to below. Thirty percent of the heat is now going into the deep ocean. Cool, deep water rises to the ocean surface, displacing warmer surface water, which in turn gets buried deeper down. This upwelling simultaneously cools the atmosphere.

The ocean is still getting warmer, but the temporary cooling of the Pacific’s surface has constrained global surface temperatures somewhat. This is reflected in ENSO’s La Nina phase. According to a paper by Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, trade winds in the subtropical Pacific have become stronger and altered ocean currents, strength­ ening subtropical sea water circulation and transport­ ing heat into the deep ocean. This vast body of wa­ ter—70% of Earth’s surface—continues to grow ever warmer, proving that global heating hasn’t taken a hia­ tus. Scientists warn that it is only a matter of time until the “missing heat” that’s being sequestered is released to blow up in our faces.

Rapidly disappearing ice masses Further proof that conditions are getting warmer is the shocking loss of ice on the planet. The melting of Earth’s cryosphere is accelerating. Last year, summer Arctic sea ice extent reached another record low, and it is not recovering. Because of darkening seawater from lack of reflective snow, the polar ocean is absorb­ ing more sunlight and warming up. The warm seawa­ ter makes for slower ice formation in the wintertime. Therefore, there is far less multi-year ice, making it much thinner and reducing not just the extent but the volume of ice as well.

We have radically altered the regime in the Arctic, which in turn, affects weather conditions in the lower latitudes. By heating the Arctic two times faster than elsewhere on the planet, the temperature gradient be­ tween it and the temperate zone has been reduced, up­ setting the heat balance.

Meandering air streams that encircle the globe draw warm air from the tropics when they swing north and draw cold air from the North Pole when they swing south. These have slowed or ground to a halt in recent summers. These gigantic airwaves can stretch from 2500 to 4000 km (1500-2500 mi.) from crest to crest. against two Democrats in the Seattle city council election.

While we in Socialist Action are criti­ cal of Socialist Alternative’s Green Party endorsement, since the Greens are a pro-capitalist organization, we see any openly socialist campaign as a step forward for working-class independence.

Socialist Action views Socialist Alter­ native’s electoral successes as a big op­ portunity for working-class candidates to step up to the plate and challenge the Democrats on their own turf.

Socialist Action critically supports all of Socialist Alternative’s candidates—in­ cluding Kshama Sawant in Seattle, Sea­ mus Whelan in Boston, and Ty Moore in Minneapolis. n An altered or super jet stream can form deep loops, block weather patterns, such as blistering heat waves and withering droughts, and hold them in place for weeks on end. In winter, prolonged, severe cold snaps can occur for the same reason.

In the last two decades, Greenland has lost 140 billion tons of ice each year, and from 2005 to 2010, it lost ice five times faster. This is occurring by two means:

1) Basal melting as warm sea water erodes the ice tongues from underneath, 2) water boring down into the ice through moulins from vast melt ponds on top and lubricating the ice’s flow to the ocean. In addition to enormous blue lakes forming, the ice is becoming pockmarked with thou­ sands of heat-absorbing dark holes filled with a com­ bination (known as cryokinite) of melt water, desert dust, soot from combustion, and algae. This feeds back on warming.

Similar conditions exist on the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), with the South Polar region losing 1320 billion metric tons of ice over the last two decades. Together, the losses in the north and south, which are accelerating, have contributed 11.1 mm in sea level rise. Since 1901, sea levels have risen 7.5 inches (19 cm), with significant contributions from alpine glaciers, which are also shrinking at an alarming rate and seriously undermining freshwater supplies for mountain communities and ecosystems.

Antarctica is in a somewhat paradoxical situation. The continent is gaining sea ice but losing land ice, which has accumulated over thousands of years through snowfall. There are two reasons sea ice is gaining in the cold season, which reflects the complexity of the changes humans have wrought. Ozone depletion over the region causes stratospheric cooling that increases winds. By making it stronger, the ozone hole is also af­ fecting the polar vortex that swirls around the bottom of the globe. Converging air currents, blowing in differ­ ent directions, push the ice around, causing it to pile Richard Clement / Reuters (Above) At least 60 people filled the May Day Bookstore in Minneapolis in a Sept. 28 campaign event for Ty Moore (standing). The event was sponsored by Socialist Alternative, Socialist Action, May Day Bookstore, and the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. $2500 was raised for the campaign.

(Left) White House protest on Feb. 17 against XL Pipeline.

up in thick ridges. This leaves more open water that can freeze.

Also, the Southern Ocean is fresh­ ening. There has been an increase in snow and rainfall due to greater vol­ umes of water vapor in a warming atmosphere. In addition, melting ice from the peninsula and WAIS pro­ vide move freshwater that freezes more easily than salty.

Fresher seawater, being less saline, means there is more stratification and less mixing between the warm and cold layers, and thus less melt­ ing of sea ice. Eighty percent of the sea ice growth can be explained by changing prevailing winds and 20% by ocean circula­ tion. The southern sea ice increase has been at a rate of 1% per decade on average over the past 30 years. This pales in comparison to the 15.5% loss per decade in the north.

While the interior of East Antarctica’s ice sheet— considered much more stable than the peninsula or WAIS—grew some between 1992 and 2011, it has been discovered that persistent wind scour on the surface actually erodes and sublimates the snow, reducing its accumulation. Because of that, researchers have found that surface-mass-balance has been overestimated by 11 to 36.5 gigatons per year. So the East Antarctic ice mass is not growing as much as had been previously assumed.

This removes further ammunition from skeptics who claim that Earth’s ice masses have always had ups and downs and always will, when the actual trend is toward loss rather than gain.

Another dire consequence of warming temperatures at the poles is the thawing of permafrost both on land and the continental shelf. Vast plumes of methane (CH4) have been found by a Russian research team in the Siberian Arctic. As frozen seafloor sediments become unstabilized by warming sea water, they are releasing hundreds of methane fountains from the sea­ bed, some more than a kilometer across. CH4 eventually oxidizes to CO2 and would ordinarily do so in the water column in the deeper ocean, but in this case, because of the shallow depths over the continental shelf, there is no time for the methane to oxidize before reaching the surface. Therefore, it is outgassing straight into the atmosphere, with 23 times more global heating poten­ tial. This is an extremely powerful feedback that could get out of control very quickly.

That is why working people the world over must take matters into their own hands and demand a system change, not climate change! n SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2013 9

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News and views from SA Canada website: http://socialistaction.ca campaign. At its heart is an anarchist-inspired “apo­ litical” movement of right wingers, anti-unionists, an­ archists, new left socialists, and others who claim that this is a movement that everyone, both “right and left,” have their reasons to support. Thus we have right wing­ ers saying that they never wanted to be in a union, and leftists denouncing the lack of concrete CFS solidarity with Quebec students. So the guiding light seems to be “let’s break the CFS and let its members spill out into