April, 24 2015, 01:45pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Reprieve’s US press office: +1 917 855 8064/ katherine.oshea@reprieve.org
Delays in Guantanamo Releases: Reprieve Comment
In response to the news that twice-cleared Guantanamo prisoner Shaker Aamer must be reviewed yet again, delaying his release, Alka Pradham, Reprieve U.S. attorney for Shaker Aamer, said:
"The news of yet another pointless review of Shaker Aamer's file is stunning; a ridiculous waste of time and resources.
NEW YORK, NY
In response to the news that twice-cleared Guantanamo prisoner Shaker Aamer must be reviewed yet again, delaying his release, Alka Pradham, Reprieve U.S. attorney for Shaker Aamer, said:
"The news of yet another pointless review of Shaker Aamer's file is stunning; a ridiculous waste of time and resources.
"The United States has already cleared Shaker for release not once, but twice - under both the Obama and the Bush administrations. The gruelling clearance process involves unanimous agreement by six federal agencies, from the Department of Justice to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
"If President Obama wants Guantanamo closed, he must fix this bureaucratic dysfunction and stop the senseless stalling.
"Shaker has suffered 13 years of the most terrible abuses, without a single charge or any trial, and must be returned home to London and his British wife and children immediately. Any further delay in his release is unconscionable."
Reprieve is a UK-based human rights organization that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantanamo Bay.
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The climate crisis will shrink the average global income 19% in the next 26 years compared to what it would have been without global heating caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, a study published in Nature Wednesday has found.
The researchers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said that economic shrinkage was largely locked in by mid-century by existing climate change, but that actions taken to reduce emissions now could determine whether income losses hold steady at around 20% or triple through the second half of the century.
"These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions," study lead author and PIK scientist Leonie Wenz said in a statement. "We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately—if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100."
"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were."
Put in dollar terms, the climate crisis will take a yearly $38 trillion chunk out of the global economy in damages by 2050, the study authors found.
"That seems like… a lot," writer and climate advocate Bill McKibben wrote in response to the findings. "The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year."
This means that the costs of inaction have already exceeded the costs of limiting global heating to 2°C by six times, the study authors said. However, limiting warming to 2°C can still significantly reduce economic losses through 2100.
"This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering noneconomic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity," Wenz said.
The damages predicted by the study were more than twice those of similar analyses because the researchers looked beyond national temperature data to also incorporate the impacts of extreme weather and rainfall on more than 1,600 subnational regions over a 40-year period, The Guardian explained.
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Unlike previous studies, the research predicted economic losses for most wealthier countries in the Global North, with the U.S. and German economies shrinking by 11% by mid-century, France's by 13%, and the U.K.'s by 7%. However, the countries set to suffer the most are countries closer to the equator that have lower incomes already and have historically done much less to contribute to the climate crisis. Iraq, for example, could see incomes drop by 30%, Botswana 25%, and Brazil 21%.
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Wenz told The Guardian that the results were "devastating."
"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking," Wenz said.
Levermann said the paper presented society with a clear choice:
It is on us to decide: Structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on, will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas, and coal.
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The peace coalition No Tech for Apartheid accused Google of a "flagrant act of retaliation" late Wednesday night as the Silicon Valley giant announced it had fired 28 workers over protests against its cloud services contract with the Israeli government.
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