What You Need To Know From The Recent Findings Of 7 Big Climate Reports

It is, in a word, “bleak.”


By Alexander C. Kaufman

The world is rapidly accelerating toward climate catastrophe, our financial institutions have their foot on the gas and pinning our hopes on Chinese leadership to desperately wrench the steering wheel away from the guardrail looks increasingly foolish.

But, hey! At least a growing percentage of Americans recognize that the federal government should do more about climate change. 

1. Global temperatures are on pace to rise as much as 3.2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century ― more than double what scientists project to be a safe range that remotely resembles our world today. 

That came from the United Nations’ latest grim assessment of the so-called emissions gap between the amount of planet-heating gases countries agreed to cut and where the current projections are headed. The Paris Agreement aimed to cap average temperatures at 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; a U.N. report last year determined that the pact’s more ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming would likely cost hundreds of millions of lives and about $54 trillion in today’s dollars. Global temperatures are already a little over 1 degree Celsius compared with the period before the advent of industrial fossil-fuel use. 

To keep warming within 1.5 degrees (about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the world will need to cut emission 7.6% every year from 2020 to 2030, the report published Monday found. 

“The summary findings are bleak,” the assessment stated. 

2. The top 10 fossil-fuel-producing countries are on track to extract 120% more oil, gas and coal than would be consistent with 1.5 degrees of warming. 

There isn’t just an emissions gap. There’s a production gap, too. That’s what this first-of-its-kind analysis by scientists at six organizations, including the United Nations Environment Programme, found last week. Projections to extract new fossil fuel reserves in China, the United States, Russia, India, Australia, Indonesia, Canada, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom exceed the limits to keep warming within 2 degrees Celsius by 50%. That figure surges to 120% when modeled for 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

While the oceans continue to rise: See Venice and Miami the mango moron and his Republican enablers continue to act like there's nothing to see here.  America's Republican party is the only major political in the world who deny that climate change is occurring.  With that denial, they've convinced their most loyal supporters that putting your head up your fat ass and denying that climate change is happening allowing them to live in a bubble of abject ignorance.