As Humans Rebel Against the Cost of Climate Change Containment

 

                                        From:    http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/

Greenhouse gas emissions, notably CO2, have reached their highest rates in four million years. All this as hurricane season is beginning, trace wildfires are already triggering in California, flooding plagues areas all over the world, even as record rainfalls in our western states has provided some relief from an otherwise steady pattern of aridification. Scientists are finding evidence in Greenland and polar regions of massive melts, glacial contraction and new under-ice warming water that is rising and melting from beneath. If Greenland’s ice were to disappear, that alone could provoke a global sea rise of 25 feet. Not to mention that as darker land and seas are revealed, from ice that otherwise would have reflected the sun’s heat, will instead absorb and retain more heat, accelerating global warming with or without a reduction in fossil fuel emissions.

An El Niño event, with drier air in northern climates, is adding heat to nature’s fire… at a very bad time. But scientists pin the lion’s share of blame for global warming on the burning fossil fuels, including forests that go up in some smoke increasingly every year. Lots of rain in our western regions will grow green until the expected drying out of these new plants creates vast stretches of new kindling for the expected rise in wildfires. As Seth Borenstein points out (Associated Press, June 6th): “The last time the air had similar amounts was during a less-hospitable hothouse Earth before human civilization took root, scientists said.

“The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration announced that the carbon dioxide level measured in May in Hawaii averaged 424 parts per million. That’s 3 parts per million more than last year’s May average and 51% higher than preindustrial levels of 280 parts per million… It is one of the largest annual May-to-May increases in carbon dioxide levels on record, behind only 2016 and 2019, which had jumps of 3.7 and 3.4 parts per million… ‘To me as an atmospheric scientist, that trend is very concerning,’ said NOAA greenhouse gas monitoring group leader Arlyn Andrews. ‘Not only is CO2 continuing to increase despite efforts to start reducing emissions, but it’s increasing faster than it was 10 or 20 years ago.’

“Emissions used to increase by maybe 1 part per million per year, but now they are increasing at twice and even three times that rate, depending on whether there is an El Niño, Andrews said… ‘The relentless rise in atmospheric CO2 is incredibly worrying if not wholly predictable,’ said Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb, who was not part of the research.

“Carbon dioxide levels have been rising steadily, with each year’s measurement higher than the last. However, there’s a seasonal cycle with carbon dioxide so that it reaches its highest saturation point in May… That’s because two-thirds of the land globally is in the Northern Hemisphere, where plants suck the most carbon dioxide out of the air during late spring and summer, causing levels to fall. They start rising again in November, Andrews said… ‘Hawaii has the longest history of direct measurements and is the home of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Keeling Curve, which has kept track of carbon in the air since 1958 when the May reading peaked at 317.5.

“Emissions have gone up about 33% since then… ‘Current emissions are going to remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and they’re going to continue to trap heat energy near Earth’s surface for thousands of years,’ Andrews said… Because of that, ‘we are still dealing with CO2 in the atmosphere that was emitted in the early-to-mid-20th century,” University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Jason Furtado, who wasn’t part of the monitoring teams, said in an email… ‘This is why we have to see emissions DROP in order to have a chance to reverse climate change. And even if/when we reverse the CO2 emissions rate, it will take some time before the climate system responds,’ he said.”

It's odd because the word “conservative” is also the root word for conservation, an ecological commitment that was at the heart of turn-of-the-century Republican policymaking. Republican President Teddy Roosevelt was at the forefront of that environmental movement. Yet today, that Republican legacy has twisted into an often religiously misplaced notion of climate change denial (after the Great Flood, many evangelicals maintain, God promised no more global natural disasters) combined with corporate greed that simply does not want to bear the costs of restricting and reversing greenhouse emissions, most of which can be traced to such unrestrained avarice.

Any effort to deal with this global killer reality is now labeled “woke,” provoking rightwing MAGA politicians to demand reduction if not elimination in existing congressionally authorized climate change focused legislation. Some red state governors and legislators, even Texas where Elon Musk is building new Tesla EV manufacturing plants, are fighting environmental rules and government programs to build charging stations and provide incentives for EV adoption. They promulgate relaxing gun ownership restrictions that have recently elevated firearm deaths as America’s number one cause of death for those under 18 and want to cut back on greenhouse controls in an era where the resulting “natural disasters” are killing indiscriminately everywhere.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time to label those who claim to be “job protectors” (even though there are vastly more actual and potential jobs in the alternative energy sector) but are instead engaging in supporting selfish policies that will kill millions and destroy trillions of dollars of property… as killers… cigarette anyone?