I’m getting a late start tonight. I have no really good excuse apart from just being a lazy bastard in general. However, you’re not paying for this so deal.
Okay, so we’re facing landscape-changing flooding, sometimes in cities ill-equipped to deal with chest-high water on a regular basis. Record droughts and once-in-a-hundred-years wildfires all over the planet every other week is also a new fact of daily existence. Every year sets a new record for hurricane frequency and intensity. We’ve started naming thunderstorms so we can keep up and the Deep South is prone to freezing rock-solid during the winter months. Just another thing we have to go through as a part of life in this modern world.
And it’s going to get worse quicker than we thought it would. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changed released its latest report on, well, climate change and it’s not good. Not good at all. Essentially, the global temperature’s jumped a significant amount and is on track to go from 1.1 degrees hotter than it should be to 1.5 degrees hotter than it should be much, much quicker than previously anticipated.
Now, I realize that doesn’t sound like that big a deal – which is part of the problem, frankly – but even this slight change has been deemed “unequivocally responsible” for everything from this summer’s killer heatwave in the Pacific Northwest to the super-charged hurricanes that have been drowning the Gulf of Mexico lately to even the bitter, killed cold that shut down the entire state of Texas earlier this year.
Now, I don’t have the time nor the patience to explain why climate change is a big deal, particularly in this, the 2,021st Foul Year of Our Lord. I realize climate denialism has a strong grip on far too many of us for far more reasons than I want to deal with. Here’s a big mess of links if you need them, and two great websites from actual climate scientists who’ve been studying this for 40 years. And the forces fighting against doing anything about this – usually fuel and oil concerns and just general Big Business looking to keep their profits high – have been putting just as much effort and way more money into convincing the hoi polloi this is all a liberal commie plot.
One of the issues is the media. There is a dearth of good science writers – people who know their stuff and can get complicated topics across to people who spent their high school science classes flicking paper footballs at each other – and there’s way, way more jabronis out there who’ll take an easy paycheck by writing the ten-thousandth reiteration of “it snowed today, what happened to global warming?”
But since its formation in 1990, the IPCC has been screaming that we’re coming up to the point-of-no-return. The point of this most recent paper is that we’ve come as close to that point-of-no-return as we can possibly get and still be able to, well, return. This is “Code Red” and without a significant decrease in greenhouse gas production. This is what the Paris Accord of 2015 was supposed to do but Trump’s pulling us out of it almost as soon as he got in the White House gave a lot of signees an excuse to not bother, either. Hey, when you claim to be the most important country in the free world and the rules don’t apply to you, shit like this will happen.
So if we – and every other country on the planet – cut automobile emissions, for example, this will help stave off the worst-case scenario. Maybe. Hopefully. Again, we’re not past the point of rescue but we’re goddamn close. This report has lit a fire under the White House and Congress and, so far, the Republican Party is still complaining about wokism and how mask mandates are the first step to Worldwide Communism. I’m sure they’ll get their “nuh-uh” talking points before the week’s out.
Whatever they say, the science says we’re up against the wall and don’t have time to screw around. However, it’s going to stay miserably hot in the summertime and nightmarishly cold in the winter. Hurricanes and torrential rains will continue to fuck up everyone’s day and droughts will continue to make basic living just that much harder. They’ve been telling us for 30 years and we’ve been letting our “leaders” get away with ignoring, but that’s all she wrote.
Welcome to the New Normal. We’ve got no one to blame but ourselves.
Dear Y'all 