As the Earth hurtles ahead towards a hotter global climate with over 2 degrees or more of higher temperatures by 2100 (only to be followed by even more global heating as vast quantities of subterrainean and sub-sea methane frozen in clathrates inexorably thaw and are released into the atmosphere (as they are already beginning to do), there is a growing and disturbing trend among some climate scientists and climate journalists to write calming articles suggesting that perhaps things won’t be so bad.
The more recent of these included an article in the New York Times by the paper’s climate writer David Wallace-Wells suggesting that while it is unlikely that the nations of the world will succeed in holding down carbon emissions to an extent that a threshhold of 1.5 degrees Celsius of higher global temperatored won’t be crossed, perhaps those partial efforts will at least slow the process and keep the global temperature from rising past 2.0 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
Wallace-Wells, who a few years earlier was writing dire warnings about disastrous and rapid warming beyond 2.5 degrees Celsius in 2100, in this latest article writes:
For decades, visions of possible climate futures have been anchored by, on the one hand, Pollyanna-like faith that normality would endure, and on theother, millenarian intuitions of an ecological end of days, during which perhaps billions of lives would be devastated or destroyed. More recently, these two stories have been mapped onto climate modeling: Conventional wisdom has dictated that meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris agreement by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees could allow for some continuing normal, but failing to take rapid action on emissions, and allowing warming above three or even four degrees, spelled doom.
Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.
Oddly, the same day his article appeared in the paper there was another article reporting on a warning by the UN Secretary General’s Office that without much stronger action by the nations of the world, especially the major industrial nations, nearly all of which have been falling well short on their carbon reduction pledges, global temperatures could reach as much as 3 degrees Celsius above 1990 levels –a catastrophe for the environment, for human populations in poorer countries, and for the world as a whole. As Jim Skea, co-chair of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III which released the latest report, warninb of the consequences of high and dangerously rising methane levels in the atmosphere put it, “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit); without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the collectively run six-time Project Censored Award-winning news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.
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