Reasonable Doubt

   

As Joe Biden visited flew over the massive devastation wreaked by forest fires in California, the consensus among Republican leaders in Congress blamed the catastrophe on one primary cause: failure of the state to maintain its forests, clearing away risky growth and dead brush. That similar devastation has occurred in red states (Idaho was Biden’s first stop) and that parallel issues defined the massive forest land solely within federal control did not matter. That virtually all the raging fires in the Western United States occurred during record-breaking heatwaves was discounted. Notably, those same Republicans did not even attempt to address the so-called “once in a hundred years” or “once in five hundred years” flood, storm surges, and major tropical precipitation (most powerful during hurricanes) that seem to be occurring almost every year. No one that could be blamed for that, it seems.

Indeed, current Republicans seem unable to accept the realities of climate change as anything human beings may have caused or over which human beings have control. A powerful and growing evangelical influence over GOP policies has belittled scientists and their findings, fostered the notion of mankind’s responsibility for climate change is a “hoax” intended to advance a “liberal agenda,” after the Great Flood (think: Noah’s ark) God promised no further global natural disasters, and the disasters we are witnessing are just normal perennial cycles that will average back to what has always been. 

According to an April 15th Pew Research poll, less than a third of Republicans think that climate change is a “major threat to the well-being of the United States.” While attitudes of younger Republicans are indeed changing on the subject, as whole Pew Research finds Global climate change was far and away a most divisive issue: Only 27 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed it was a threat, compared to 84 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Republicans have not always been so die-hard opposed to “doing something” to mitigate the damages from climate change, a reality support by over 97% of the relevant scientific community. But in recent years, the GOP has lurched severely to the right, embracing evangelical values as their new guiding force. 

Adele Peters, writing for the September 13th FastCompany.com, takes us back in time of the issue: “Thirty-three years ago, on a sweltering summer day in 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen stood up in front of Congress and testified about an existential threat to the planet: The climate was changing. Heat-trapping gases from fossil fuels were pushing up the global temperature and would lead to more extreme heat and drought in the future. It wasn’t the first warning about the problem, but it helped spur a response. Even George H.W. Bush, campaigning for president at the time, pledged to take on the ‘greenhouse effect.’ The same year, the United Nations launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC.

“A year later, the fossil fuel industry launched an organization to help sow doubt about the problem, funding researchers who were willing to argue that climate science was uncertain, even as internal research at Shell and Exxon detailed the catastrophes that were likely to come from the use of their products. Governments moved slowly to respond, and emissions continued to grow.

“We’re living with the consequences of delayed action now, as CO2 levels in the atmosphere have reached a record high. In the Pacific Northwest, hundreds of people and more than a billion marine animals died in the extreme heat wave in June; in an attempt to escape the heat, baby birds jumped out of their nests before they could fly. In Europe, unprecedented flooding killed more than 170 people and swept away houses. In China, record-breaking rain poured into a subway line and killed 14 people, leaving others trapped until they could be rescued. In Siberia, more than 200 wildfires have burned this summer, and obliterated forests have released records amounts of CO2. Brazil is facing a historic drought. In the Gulf of Mexico, overheated water supercharged Hurricane Ida, which left more than a million people in Louisiana without power and caused at least 52 deaths in the Northeastern U.S. After the latest bleak IPCC report explaining how much worse the situation could get, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that the report was a ‘code red for humanity.’

“Earlier this year, the Biden administration pledged that U.S. would hit net-zero emissions by 2050 and cut emissions 50% by the end of this decade to start reaching that goal. Other countries, and dozens of companies, have the same mid-century emissions goal. Hitting those targets will require massive changes. But they arguably don’t go far enough. The goals center around trying to limit global warming to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit]—but we’re already seeing catastrophic impacts as the Earth’s temperature has risen only around 1 degree [1.8 degrees Fahrenheit]. Current rates of emissions are so high that it’s likely that we’ll blow pass the 1.5 degree threshold within a decade, far earlier than 2050, and then face the challenge of trying to bring the temperature back down to ‘only’ a 1.5-degree rise later in the century. Even if the goal is a 1.5-degree limit, we’ll have to move faster to reach it. And with the future of civilization at stake, we should rethink whether the goal is ambitious enough.”

Where did that 1.5-degree number come from? Clearly, we are already experiencing intolerable levels disaster at a 1 degree Celsius rise. “[I]n the 1970s… someone first proposed that society should aim for a specific limit on global warming—and it was an economist, not a climate scientist, who made the suggestion that the limit should be 2 degrees Celsius [3.6 degree Fahrenheit]. It was essentially a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and based partly on what seemed to be technologically and politically possible, not what might be ideal for the planet. But the 2-degree goal began to get political support.” Peters. 

Governments dropped that number to 1.5 degrees as the catastrophes mounted. Indeed, after an IPCC conference in 2018, they “put out a report in 2018 that concluded that 2 degrees of warming would, in fact, have significantly worse impacts than 1.5 degrees. At 2 degrees of warming, for example, tens of millions more people will be exposed to extreme heat, and 99% of coral reefs would likely disappear. The impacts get even worse if the global temperature increases above 2 degrees.” Peters. 

Bottom line: achieving that 1.5 degree number by 2050 is too little too late. Letting that number rise to 2 degrees is nothing short of existentially catastrophic. If we do not accelerate our efforts, if we do not face a horrible reality soon, life on earth may well be a survivalist world that makes post-apocalyptic motion pictures seem mild by comparison. We’re at 1% now… how bad do you think it can get at 1.5 degrees?

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are now well above any reasonable doubt threshold that man-induced climate change is real and, unless reversed soon, will wreak devastation on this planet beyond our imagination.