Our Worsening Climate
Terry H. Schwadron
Aug. 12, 2021
The new UN report this week underscored that climate disruption is already here — and worsening yet more quickly. The question is whether it joins other such reports collecting dust on the shelf or actually moves us to act.
Basically, dramatic weather is telling us we’ve already crossed some of the climate lines, summarized The New York Times. As The Washington Post reported, there is no way this is accidental, but as the committed results of a century of burning fossil fuels. The report details how humans have altered the environment at an “unprecedented” pace and cautions that the world risks increasingly catastrophic effects in the absence of rapid greenhouse gas reductions.
The report demands international action — now, unless you follow Newsmax or Breitbart, the right-leaning sites, which did not mention the report at all.
Generally, our politicians — and those overseas, for that matter — are debating possible power shifts in elections, insisting on individual rights over any need for government policies about pandemics, banner-waving about the dangers of immigration and inflation — and who’s up or down in the political wars.
In the early morning hours on Wednesday, we could see the beginnings of stirring in the Senate’s whirlwind passage of a technical budget document that will authorize a lot more spending on social services — and climate-oriented investments. But it was carried — no, forced — by Democrats alone and passed 50–49 only because one Republican was absent. Of course, the vote is only a tiny first step towards doing something.
As The Times encapsulates, nations have delayed limiting fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has found.
This is Science, not Politics, of course, though according to our continuing snubbing of Science and all other elitist undertakings, we may or may not choose to accept this particular piece of truth. As with coronavirus mutations, vaccines safety and other would-be Leftist misinterpretations, unless enough Americans see direct arrival of climate change on their block, there is no need to be concerned.
Except that it is here — on your block.
Change is here
It’s in the wildfires now turned year-long menaces on a scale not seen previously, it’s in the rising waters and the growing droughts in hotter-than-average places. It’s here, if we just look, says the UN report — a report on which 195 nations and 200 scientists have signed off.
Even if nations started sharply cutting fossil-fuel emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise around 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades, a hotter future that is now essentially locked in.
This week, we’re seeing the U.S. Congress only under the most excruciating pressure and partisan self-discipline inch anything that moves us away from burning oil or investing in technologies to change emissions.
From Donald Trump on down, Republicans are united in opposing big spending for anything that looks, feels or supports principles of a Green New Deal. The sizable Republican opposition would have us stick our head into the drying sands.
The import of the report is clear: This is not some unhinged theory from the distant future. It’s a real problem and worsening on the current path. Where is the Republican alternative to a Green New Deal? Even the business-driven marketplace is moving ahead without their participation.
At 1.5 degrees of warming, scientists have found, the dangers grow considerably. Nearly 1 billion people worldwide could swelter in more frequent life-threatening heat waves. Hundreds of millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. Some animal and plant species alive today will be gone, as The Times culls from the report.
Beyond that, as we head towards 2, 3, 4 more degrees Celsius, we can expect a sliding path towards mass starvation, mass immigration and deaths.
Waiting on Government
Despite pledges from Joe Biden and other world leaders, current policies in the major polluting countries are still far off-track from capping temperature rise. The 10 biggest greenhouse gas polluters are China, the United States, the European Union, India, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran and Canada.
Together, there is little concerted action, though individual countries — or individual cities and states or businesses — are moving towards rules favoring electric cars. But there is little widespread movement towards new attitudes towards oil usage, agricultural change or industrialization.
Instead, we have competitive economic concerns, and short-term worries about jobs. The political globe as we know it can’t even get people to agree to wear masks or take free vaccines to hold off personal immunization from a global pandemic. The entire Republican agenda in the United States is to stop the Democratic half of the country from acting in ways that mandate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report details how humans have altered the environment at an “unprecedented” pace and cautioned that the world risks increasingly catastrophic impacts in the absence of rapid greenhouse gas reductions. As The Post noted, the report leaves no remaining scientific doubt that humans are fueling climate change.
The only question is what we want to do about it.
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