In the United States, an entire mainstream political party is dead set against funding programs dedicated to containing climate change, even as trillions of dollars of resultant damage – particularly in red states – continues to wreak havoc with “once every hundred years” natural disasters occurring monthly. We’re hardly alone in this failed effort, even with Biden squeezing some federal commitments past a highly resistant GOP congressional pushback. But we are rich enough to tackle the problem, and we absolutely know better. Yet denial still persists in the GOP!
The global response is not too far behind our own lackadaisical approach. As Max Bearak, writing for the October 26th New York Times warns: “Countries around the world are failing to live up to their commitments to fight climate change, pointing Earth toward a future marked by more intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction, according to a report issued Wednesday [10/26] by the United Nations.
“Just 26 of 193 countries that agreed last year to step up their climate actions have followed through with more ambitious plans. The world’s top two polluters, China and the United States, have taken some action but have not pledged more this year, and climate negotiations between the two have been frozen for months.
“Without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the report said, the planet is on track to warm by an average of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels, by 2100… That’s far higher than the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) set by the landmark Paris agreement in 2015, and it crosses the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic climate impacts significantly increases.
“With each fraction of a degree of warming, tens of millions more people worldwide would be exposed to life-threatening heat waves, food and water scarcity, and coastal flooding while millions more mammals, insects, birds and plants would disappear.” Most of the world is either reactive, solely to the damage from the natural disasters themselves, or simply dismissive of the suffering, the soaring food prices from agricultural disruption from what we politely refer to as “drought,” when it really is a more permanent desertification.
We do not even concern ourselves with bizarre changes in wildlife migration patterns, the disappearance of entire species – all warning us of what could easily happen to humanity as climate moves from merely disruptive to intolerable – and the spread of disease as germs attach to reflect their own climatical needs. The vicious cycle of searing seasonal heat that is simply countered by fossil-fuel-consuming air conditioning is a wild contradiction masquerading as a new basic human need. Increasingly, regions all over the world are reaching the point where they will no longer be habitable, at least by human beings.
As global threats mount, most recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we reprioritize our commitment to climate change accordingly. It’s now “ok” to postpone or deprioritize relying on fossil fuel during periods of conflict. Artillery and missile strikes, raising massive clouds of greenhouse gasses are just the way it is. And our inability to stop many of these “natural disasters” actually reverses large chunks of climate change progress where it has been prioritized. California, with its wildfires, saw all of its clean air initiatives vaporize as these fires dumped more carbon into the atmosphere than California’s environmental initiatives were able to remove.
“On [October 24th], the European Union said it would increase its emissions reductions pledges ‘as soon as possible’ but could not do so until its member states agreed on a number of upcoming climate laws… That delay is ‘hugely disappointing’ said Niklas Höhne, founder of the NewClimate Institute in Cologne, Germany. ‘This year we’ve seen little of the climate action governments promised at the end of Glasgow, amid a deluge of new science telling us that we have to move faster, and that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is still entirely possible. We need governments to set strong targets that drive emissions down, and decarbonize their economies.’” NY Times.
China has stopped cooperating, Russia is no longer part of the climate change dialog, India is struggling with globalized inflationary distress and no longer stressing climate change, and the United States... well, as long has half of the American body politic is in denial of the problem, unwilling to commit remotely enough resources… Yeah, that!
So, we need to get used to the species loss, the migration of disease, killer storms, massive lost of productive agricultural land, extreme water and food shortages, wildfires destroying oxygen-producing forests and even human structures, coastal erosion on steroids, flooding, tornados and rising costs everywhere. We will continue pay more each year, trillions of dollars, in reaction to the “natural disasters” inexorably linked to our ignoring the obvious need to contain and stop climate change. We are already slipping past that tipping point where climate change damage becomes self-perpetuating even with containment efforts.
I’m Peter Dekom, and the laws of physics (Mother Nature if you will) cannot be repealed by referendum or stopped because we don’t like them… so why does most of humanity think or act otherwise?
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