Another "Odd Eyed" Cat

Here are some wonderful photos that I was recently turned on to, by a Japanese photographer who documented the relationship between her 88 year old Grandmother and her cat.

Since I have two "Van Cats" myself, I couldn't help but love these photos.


http://www.viralforest.com/misao-fukumaru/

The Feast of Samhain, 2013

Feast of Samhain, 2012

I'll be celebrating the "The Feast of  Samhain" again (November 1st), with a place set at the table for the Guest of Honor, the Ancestors and the Beloved Dead.  As last year, it will be a candlelit night of sharing stories of those who have passed away but remain in our hearts, our memory, and our bloodlines. What is remembered lives. 

Decor will include, of course, pumpkins, to commemorate also the Last Celtic Harvest Festival (there are 3), All Hallows Night, before going into the darkness of Winter.  And November 1st is also the Witches New Year, as well as Dia de Los Muertos, something widely celebrated here in the Southwest, and in Tucson, with a famous parade (and just in case you don't believe the Spirits come to join the Celebration, check out Ginny's "Orb" photo below from last years parade.

Photo by Ginny Moss

I don't feel that I can say anything more eloquent about this High Holy Day than I have in previous years, so I copy below musing from a previous year..........and also a post I did on Dia de Los Muertos can be found HERE.  I  Wish all a very wonderful Samhain!

Mariachi Wedding from All Soul's Procession, Tucson

© dominic arizona bonuccelli | AZFOTO

 I remember  the Spiral Dance, which I participated in a number of times in San Francisco (I created the Masks of the Goddess for the 20th Annual Spiral Dance).  I also brought this beautiful ritual to Tucson in 2000 with the help of Priestess  Macha NightMare.   When one has danced the Spiral Dance and come face to face with each participant in the course of the dance, you leave changed.  

November 1st has been called the "Witches New Year", and what comes to mind. of course, is the universal image of the  "Witch and her broom". The Broom is associated with many folk traditions of "sweeping away the old bad energies" - purification rituals for the home and Hearth (Heart). Traditionally this was the time to celebrate the last of three Celtic Harvest Festivals before going into the dark of Winter.   It is the closing of the old year,  a time to honor the ancestors, the harvest, and the gifts of the year past.  When I lay out the Feast, I always imagine many generations laying out the last fresh apples, the treasured honey mead reserved only for special occasions, and toasts raised  to the invisible ones,  their plates heaped high as well. Inherent in this celebration was a profound respect for the Spiral wheel of the year,  cycling the natural cycles of death and re-birth.

Here is my gratitude to the year that is soon to pass away, and to all of those who have passed away from my life as well, people who have gifted me and created with me and loved me, and I them.  Blessed Be!

Sometimes we don't realize, because things manifest through time, the ways that our wishes have often been granted.  Thinking of the Spiral Dance, and Reclaiming, I remember another one of those stories of Grace and Magic, and want to tell it, although, as all true stories are, it's part of a much larger story that is woven into the fabric of my life, and lots of other lives.  I think when we tell  these stories we get a glimpse of how seamless "reality" really is.  And Magic is always afoot, although I don't believe it has anything to do with wands.  I think it's much more about Weaving and being Woven.

"Gaia" (1986)

When I was in graduate school, I began reading "The Spiral Dance" by Starhawk.  It was such a revelation, the way she spoke about the Goddess, and a theology of Immanence.  It became the central inspiration for one of my shows while in Grad school.  When I graduated I went to live in New York, and married, and then in 1997 got divorced.  My ex and I were very involved with the Pagan community on the East Coast, and when we divorced I felt like I lost my community.   In those days I was doing Renaissance Faires, so I packed up my van and became a nomad.

I had a booth in the fall of that year at the Maryland Renaissance Faire, and I happened to hear of a holistic health practitioner who also did shamanic work and "soul retrievals" in the area.  I figured it couldn't hurt, so I made an appointment.  We lay down on the floor, he "journeyed" for me, and "blew my soul pieces" back into my chest.  I didn't know what to think, but as he described his impressions, among them he told me that there were two things that would show me that my old life, were over.  One was a magenta flower, a Cosmos.  The other was a little terra cotta angel.

In November I packed up and went to Arizona to spend the winter in my trailer.  By March I was  wondering where to go next.  I had recently discovered the Internet, so I looked up just about everything I was interested in - Goddess, ritual, mask theatre, transpersonal psychology, etc.  Every single time it came up Berkeley, Marin Country, or San Francisco!   The clincher was when I was looking for the email for something called the Center for Symbolic Studies near New Paltz, New York.  I knew Stephen and Robin Larsen, and wanted to get a recommendation from them. Up came the Center for Symbolic Studies in Berkeley, California!  And the Center was the creation of a Jungian psychologist named Robert H. Hopcke  who had just written a book called There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives!

Well, that was enough for me, so I packed up the van when the show ended,  and headed west to California, back to the Berkeley I remembered so well but hadn't seen in over 20 years.  I decided I would sleep in my van if I had to, until I could find a place to stay (and fortunately for me, I had no idea of how hard it can be to find a place to stay in Berkeley now.....)

Arriving finally, I looked around for a familiar landmark, and found the Cafe Mediterranean.  I didn't know anyone anymore in Berkeley, but for old times sake I parked the van nearby and went in for my first Cappachino since the 70's.  As I stood in line, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said "Are you Lauren Raine?"  It was my old friend Joji!  I couldn't believe it.  He bought me a cup of coffee, asked me where I was staying, I told him I had just arrived and planned on moving back to Berkeley, and he invited to stay at his house where he had an extra room.  I didn't have to sleep in my car for even one night!

Judy Foster

And when I went to his house that evening, in his living room was a big, framed close-up photograph of a magenta Cosmos.

When, two months later, I found a room to rent with Judy Foster, the first thing I encountered when I walked into her house was an altar with a terra cotta angel.  And as it turned out, Judy was one of the founders of Reclaiming and the Spiral Dance, and a close friend of Starhawk.   The universe put me exactly where I needed to go, a Spiral Dance.

"Handle With Care" Synchronicity

I don't know what's in the stars, but it's been a month of "everything is going wrong".  Or another way to put it would be that it's been one of those "lessons and learning experiences" months.

I returned to Tucson to find my mother with health problems.  A tooth went bad and had to be extracted.  The roommate/caretaker was impossible to live with, and I had to very gingerly and diplomatically find a new home for her, which ended up being expensive, although it ended well.

Or so I thought until I learned that the room she was in, the one she always had the windows and curtains closed in with the in-room air conditioner running..........was the same room she was chain smoking in, because she didn't want me to know she smoked.  My best room now smells like a bar................ever try to get deeply embedded cigarette smoke out of a room you rent to people who are often sensitive to smell?  It's an ordeal that involves painting every surface with a special sealant, and then re-painting, as well as renting an expensive ozone cleanser machine. Whew..........

So  last week I was surprised when I went to my car (in a parking lot) to see a pile of latex gloves all around the front of my car.  Latex gloves?  I picked them up, not being a person who wastes things, threw the mass into the back of the car, drove off.  But the sight of that pile of gloves on the parking lot by my car was so strange I couldn't help wondering if it had some kind of "symbolic value". 

A week ago a guest arrived who was going to stay a month in my guesthouse in the back.  I've always had such friendly experiences with the people who've stayed there.  But as soon as she moved in things got strange.  She complained, complained, complained, she sulked, she glared at me when she walked by, she said the neighbors were intrusive and noisy.  Since she paid in advance  I bent over backwards to appease her. I apologized several times for neighborhood noise.   I gave her 1/4th of the rent back in cash "for her inconvenience".  I told her I'd refund all if she wanted to find something else, and was told she had no where to go and was "stuck".

Then she took to blasting a radio toward my fence, to "get even" with the neighbors (who are very quiet). It took some talking down and  placating to deal with this, in the course of which I learned that she believes she is stalked by an invisible enemy, that no one believes her, and "they" get to her wherever she goes, including putting poison in her car every night.  After I talked her into calmness (and got the radio off), I retired feeling very sad at the endless suffering of this woman, who needed meds and help I could not provide,  and also frightened for myself, my other guests,  and my property.

With much careful effort, I managed to get her to leave without violence - handle with care, indeed, just like nurses must handle patients who are "infectious".  And I learned something about myself, and the need to not react and become "infected" by her emotional and psychological insanity.  Gloves are to avoid "infection", which means, reaction.

Last, I've spent the past day cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, the space this sad woman inhabited, which she left in bad shape, along with the challenging room the clandestine smoker left behind.    The gloves came in handy not only as metaphor, but literally. 

Terry Pratchett - Choosing to Die

 

"It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life"

"The trouble with having an open mind is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."

 

Terry Pratchett

I have always loved Terry Pratchett, who, like Ursula Leguin, has provided me with such wonderful worlds to investigate, laugh about, and learn from in his prolific writings.  He  is so beloved in England that he became Sir Terry Pratchett. Sir Terry Pratchett is the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld series. He’s the author of fifty bestselling books and his novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen. He’s the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood.  In December 2007, Sir Terry announced that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and he has campaigned and donated $1 million to Alzheimer’s Research UK.

In this documentary Terry Pratchett discusses his Alzheimer's and how it is slowly eroding his life and his talent. He meets others with medical conditions which will inevitably lead to a prolonged, painful and above all undignified death and asks the question "is it better to end things early?" There are few answers here. Pratchett has spent his life inquiring into every cultural assumption, and his film is no less a genuine mission of inquiry as he faces his own situation.  He takes a frank look at a subject most shy away from.

I try to keep my blog on the light side, or at least, the political/mystical side, but sometimes I don't know how to write away my personal troubles.  For five years now, my brother Glenn has been in a vegetative state in a nursing home, the result of a brain stem stroke in 2008.  I am also responsible for my mother, who, thankfully, is in an assisted living facility, and slips away into a cheerful, if confused, dementia.  Although I comfort myself with the idea that "brain dead" means no consciousness, and he's not in his body anymore,  to be honest, Glenn's one good eye opens, sometimes you would swear he's looking at you, his mouth moves.   How do you deal with that, the thought that he may be conscious sometimes?  If he is, I can't help him.  My other brother will not legally allow me to remove life support, and if I pull the plug, I would become a person who is legally considered a murderer.  And so I go talk to him, tell him he can leave this world, tell him not to be afraid.  I wish I was a medium, or had the faith of a priest sometimes.

 Sir Terry's film is somewhat related, and a hard film to watch.  Most people will turn away from having to think about such things, and I don't blame them.   The Romans believed in honorable suicide - when someone felt their meaningful life was over, they would hold a party, invite their friends and family, drink the best wine and favorite food, reminisce and give away gifts.  And then they would slit their wrists, leaving this world among the people and things they best loved.  For myself, it seems a much better idea than to end up like the people in my brother's ward.  I had a friend who, faced with incurable cancer, chose to take all of his saved up pain meds.  I respect his choice, and my only regret is that he wasn't able to gather his friends around to say goodbye when he did it.   I have my own living will, and perhaps, if I'm  faced with something like Terry Pratchett,  that might be my choice as well. I don't know.

http://youtu.be/slZnfC-V1SY

Guest House

During the winter and spring I support myself, and am able to keep my house,  mostly by renting rooms to women visiting Tucson, and occasionally the renovated Airstream trailer in the back to both men and women.  If I'm feeling especially lively, everyone gets breakfast, but not always.  I never expected I'd be making a living changing sheets and making toast, but it's been a blessing, a lot of fun,  and I've met some great people, including people from Paris, Tasmania, and Helsinki.

I really appreciate the site that I work with, and others like it.  In this time of big boxes and vast corporations, it's great to see small enterprises, and resource and skill exchanges, still around, even thriving.  I think it's the wave of the future, at least, I hope so.

And you never know what kind of haven you might be providing, what effect, if any, your presence or art or stories or garden, or even the books lying around that you haven't read in years...... might have.  And, of course, the other way around as well.......which reminded me of this poem by Rumi.

The Guest-House

 
This being human is a guest-house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you
out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Say I Am You: Poetry Interspersed with Stories of Rumi and Shams,
 Translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks,  1994.

The Wind Sculptor from Holland

Dutch Wind Sculptor Creates New Form of Life!

What shape
waits in the seed of you to grow
and spread its branches against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?


David Whyte

 

I posted about this amazing artist several years ago, and felt like sharing his work again.  I have to thank my friend Charlie Spillar for this BBC Video about the Dutch sculptor Theo Jansen and his "Strandbeests". 

  I'm in awe of his vision!  I wish I could see this new evolutionary creature make it's way back to the sea in person!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSKyHmjyrkA

Cats...........

Lucy and Lulu demonstrate symmetry

Walking Dogs...........

Walking Cats........

Dogs making friends

Cats making friends

And of course, Henri the Existentialist Cat's thoughts about the approach of Halloween:

Energy Medicine Conference in Tucson November 8 - 10

 Sometimes synchronicities can happen in funny ways........it's as if our thoughts go out and get a response in the Big Conversation with instant gratification! I was grousing to myself because a Conference I want to attend  costs a lot to travel to and attend.  To tell you the truth, I can't afford it.

So I was pleased to learn when I opened my email about a fascinating conference coming up soon in my own home town in November........and the Producer has made a point of making it very affordable, recognizing that many people who work in the field of alternative healing are,  not unlike artists, often "financially challenged".

Two of  Tucson's own visionaries,  Dr. William Tiller and Dr.Gary Swartz, will be speaking.  If you register before the 20th of October, it's only $99.00 for the full three days.  I'm excited!


http://www.naturaltucson.com/TUCS/October-2013/Understanding-the-Science-of-Energy-Medicine-Conference/

Understanding the Science of Energy Medicine Conference

Dr. William Tiller

The Science, Spirit and Health Symposium is holding their second annual conference, "Understanding the Science of Energy Medicine" , from November 8 through 10, in Tucson. The symposium intends to take a sizeable step in taking Energy Medicine further “out of the closet” and into the mainstream, featuring Dr. William Tiller, who appeared in the film, What the Bleep Do We Know? and University of Arizona scientist Dr. Gary Schwartz, as well as other nationally and locally known presenters, researchers and energy medicine practitioners.

The film, The Living Matrix, and the keynote address of the 2011 ISSEEM Conference on Energy Medicine’s History and Future by Bruce Lipton, a cellular biologist and author The Biology of Belief and Spontaneous Evolution, will be screened, as well.  Tiller will present: The Experiments that turned Orthodox Science on It’s Head! and Schwartz, author of The Sacred Promise: The Energy Healing Experiments, will present: The Energy Healing Experiments.

Art Giser, founder of Energetic NLP, will speak about "What You Absolutely Need to Know About Your Energy Field." Dr. Melinda Connor, a neuropsychologist and internationally recognized researcher, will present: "How Music Heals Your Brain".

Earlybird pricing: all three days for $99 until Oct 20. Register at NewGroundEvents.com. For more information, email JoshuaDanHorner@yahoo.com.

This article appears in the October 2013 issue of TUCS

Kandinsky on Art, Art as Magic...............

 

Kandinsky on painting (1903)

"Painting is an art. And art is a power that should be aimed at developing the soul.  If art does not do this job, the abyss that separates us from God is left without a bridge. The artist owes his talent to God and has to settle this debt. To do this, he has to work hard, know that he is free in his art but not in his commitment to life. Everything he feels and thinks is part of the raw material with which to improve the spiritual atmosphere around him."

"The Magician stands with his arm raised in the classic gesture of inspired invocation.  He draws the white light of universal energy (the Above) through his  skilled hand, his will, and then through his heart, to manifest on the physical plane (the Below).  As his creative energies manifest, they are broken into the "rainbow" components of the physical world in all of it’s lovely diversity.The Mage is an artist in every sense of the word, for his magic arises from a skilled and disciplined understanding of the tools he has to work with, his intention, and connection to the infinite realm from which all manifestations originate. The Magician card urges you to remember that you are the artist - the  Mage - of your life."

From "The Rainbow Bridge Oracle"

              The Card Deck may be ordered from:  www.rainewalker.com -   order form  

To purchase the accompanying book visit:  

THE RAINBOW BRIDGE ORACLE:  A Divination System

All artwork is copyright Lauren Raine MFA (2013)

 

Raukkadesa

Out beyond ideas
of wrong doing and right doing,
there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down
in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language
- even the phrase "each other" -
do not make any sense.

From The Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks.

When you do a lot of driving, without a radio or tape player, you either find yourself becoming very, very bored, or you make a meditation of it.  I guess, being such a nomad over the years, driving has become my form of meditation, and I do some of my best thinking with the white line unrolling before me.  It's a good metaphor, isn't it?   

I found the word "raukkadessa"  often popped into my  mind this summer, and I've made notes for an entry that never seems to be able to be finished.  "Raukkadessa" is a shamanic  concept, one that I was introduced to in 2004 by singer and songwriter Kathi Huhtaluhta.   The word came from a song on her album  Beyond Love  (Sami Records, 2004).  Kathi  lived in Finland,   where she studied "Yoik" traditions of Sami chanting.  But she also became very influenced by Sami folklore and spirituality while there.

Kathy told me her song, Raukkadessa, derived from a word she learned  which meant "beyond love".  Meaning, beyond the pairs of opposites, beyond loss, conflict,  history, the constructs of personality and culture, beyond even our temporal experience of love (or hate)....."there is a field". 

And perhaps the purposes of that  exchange, or that experience, are unintelligible in temporal terms, lie beneath, or above, the surfaces of our lives............I don't know.   I think of my friends song, of  "Raukkadesa", and sometimes it  has helped me to let go of anger, regret, blame or loss, and accept the mysteries of my life, to appreciate, if not always understand, the evolutionary pattern.  

I remember an artist  I met in California who told me, quite seriously, that she believed she had been collaborating creatively with a man in New Jersey for 40 years.  She said she had never met him, and probably never would.  

I've often found that people have given me gifts that take time and maturity to understand. 
Recently I had a month of conflict with a roommate, which was, of course, very uncomfortable, and full of the judgemental polarization of "she's wrong, she's crazy" etc.  It was exhausting. As it turned out, she really did need her own space, and we were a poor match as roommates.  But for me, she provided me with some important growth and self-understanding, because I had to come to grips with ways that I was being unsympathetic, judgemental, possessive about the space, and unkind to someone who, I began to realize, was quite fragile.  After all the blustering, I had to take a look at that very uncomfortable place of  remorse for my behavior.  When I finally got it, I decided I needed to do what I could to put things right, and I helped her in various ways to find a new place.  Ultimately, we parted in a friendly manner.  And I have some satisfaction that it was a win-win situation in the end.  A gift.

What we call "forgiveness", I find, mostly has to do with forgiving myself.  It's much easier to forgive others.  The word "fore-give" means to give the energy forward, to not constrict oneself in time and place.   At some moments, one sees that what happened was a  node in the Web, and they were there, co-creators,  all the time.  The threads others wove for and with me become an important motif in the tapestry of my life.  But the pattern is only visible with an overview, if it's ever consciously visible at all.     I don't like the term "guidance", I prefer the word "Conversation".   Beyond the immediacies of our  sequential lives, "there is a field"  where the Conversation goes on within the  stories of our lives. 

 I STOOD POISED UPON THE EDGE OF TOWN,
AND HEARD THE BLUE STARS  SINGING

Weary ideas rise and fall
into blessed exhaustion.
I touch that essence,
that blood-red honey wine,
this strange distillation.

I entered a lucid dream,
I found a lucid life.

Through my open window, I see
a black, far horizon,
and I hear the blue stars singing
memories of memories

I wish I could tell you
what I have seen
in the homelands.

Perhaps, in that country,
we are of each other at last......
You take my hand, we walk together
in that green and splendid
meadow.
I offer you a glass,
you raise your cup to mine
a butterfly rises between us,
flies into the morning
from the other side
of forever.

Through an open window,
I hear the stars singing.......
But I write this in a small, dark room
here, and now,
wishing I could be young again,
wishing I could feel
something other than foolish.

I will always remember you
between
always between

(2002)

Climate Change is Unequivocal says IPCC

 

In keeping with the previous post,  I feel I need to post this important summary from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  We need to remember and re-invent and inspire all the good things that are being done, all the people who are developing grass roots programs, alternative energy, activism for the Earth, and new paradigms of spirituality that encompasses nature, justice for all beings  upon the Earth, and justice for our children, who must live into a changed and troubled future.   But there cannot be room any longer for denial.............

'Unequivocal' says IPCC

Global scientific consensus says the planet is changing in ways unseen in thousands of years and if something 'substantial' not done, and soon, the results will be unthinkable."

- Jon Queally, staff writer

 If the public and policymakers want a single adjective to describe the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new assessment report that's the word.
Released Friday, the IPCC report states, that "warming in the climate system is unequivocal and since 1950 many changes have been observed throughout the climate system that are unprecedented over decades to millennia."

"Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased,” said Qin Dahe, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I, responsible for this first stage of the IPCC's report on climate.  Read the full report here.  Headline statements from the IPCC here (pdf).  The report reaffirms that the human influence on the planet's dramatic warming is clear and beyond reproach. According to a press statement accompanying the release of the report:

It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. The evidence for this has grown, thanks to more and better observations, an improved understanding of the climate system response and improved climate models.

Thomas Stocker, Co-Chair of the working group behind the report indicated that in order to prevent the worst case scenarios presented in the report for the century ahead, governments will need to take aggressive action. "Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system," Stocker said. "Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions."

The IPCC document—officially labeled as IPCC Working Group I assessment report (AR5) and titled Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis—was approved by the world scientific body on Friday in Stockholm and is the panel's official statement—made after hundreds of the world's top scientists reviewed thousands of studies—on climate change, ocean and atmospheric temperatures, and global warming.

“As the ocean warms, and glaciers and ice sheets reduce, global mean sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years,” said Dahe.  And its other key findings are startling. They include:

• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.
• Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years (medium confidence).
• Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence). It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0−700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010, and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971.
• Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent (high confidence).
• The rate of sea level rise since the mid-19th century has been larger than the mean rate during the previous two millennia (high confidence). Over the period 1901–2010, global mean sea level rose by 0.19 [0.17 to 0.21] m.
• The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions. The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification.
• Total radiative forcing is positive, and has led to an uptake of energy by the climate system. The largest contribution to total radiative forcing is caused by the increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 since 1750.
• Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.

“The world’s scientists have spoken," said Sarah-Jayne Clifton, climate justice and energy coordinator for Friends of the Earth International, in reaction to the report. Clifton said the report once again reaffirms "now with absolute certainty" that climate change is caused by humans and "that it poses a severe and immediate threat to our future and that of the planet."

"Communities around the world are already being devastated by extreme weather. It is untenable for our political leaders to continue their inaction," she said. "The interests of humanity must be prioritized above the profits of dirty energy corporations through an urgent and dramatic transformation of the world’s corporate-controlled, unsustainable energy system."