Methane and Carbon Dioxide levels are soaring across the planet, causing even more damage to the climate and the biosphere.
Humans struggled in an age of instability for most of early history, with small-scale agriculture emerging around 12,000 years ago, allowing civilization to emerge slowly. Many emerging cultures did not survive over time because of isolated climatic changes, both small and large, and primarily by drought.
The changes in rainfall challenged these societies, yet not one piece of evidence has emerged in the rubble of those societies that they made any attempt to save themselves. Business as usual even in the ancient world. This lack of inflexibility doomed them, according to satellite data from NASA. Emily Soan wrote the following: “As archaeologists continue to turn up ever more signs of collapsed civilizations, they find plenty of evidence that climate shifts are at least partly to blame for the decline in many cases. Those links offer the opportunity to protect the future of our society by learning from the mistakes of our ancestors.”
Over one hundred million people in the United States are in a heat emergency. Drought, flooding, and heat waves have challenged those of us alive today as those phenomena affect our ability to feed ourselves and quench our thirst. Staring down calamity, we have yet to respond in a way that would make our survival different from the inaction of our long-dead ancient ancestors.
The evidence of collapse is overwhelming, and one must be blind not to see what is happening to the fragile earth we call home this summer — resulting from a wisp of added CO2 in the atmosphere.
After President Biden warned of executive actions if Congress did not act to address the climate breakdown, Republicans in Congress and their unhinged death cult followers on Twitter have gone ballistic at any attempt to slow climate armageddon.
Lisa Friedman and Jonathan Weisman write an article on GQP intransigence on any mediation to save our collective skins in the NY Times,Delay as the New Denial: The Latest Republican Tactic to Block Climate Action.
Overwhelmingly, Republicans on Capitol Hill say that they believe that the United States should be drilling and burning more American oil, gas and coal, and that market forces would somehow develop solutions to the carbon dioxide that has been building in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a blanket around a sweltering Earth.
“I’m not in a position to tell you what the solution is, but for the president to shut down the production of oil and gas in the United States is not going to help,” said Senator Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho.
President Biden is not proposing to shut down fossil fuel production. He wants to use tax credits and other incentives to speed up the development of wind, solar, and other low-carbon energy, and to make electric vehicles more affordable.
The fact that scientists say nations must quickly cut greenhouse gas emissions or global rising temperatures will reach catastrophic levels does not appear to faze many conservatives.
In many ways, elected Republicans mirror the views of their voters. A May poll commissioned by Pew Research Center found 63 percent of Democrats named climate change as a very big problem, while just 16 percent of Republicans felt the same.
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Republicans grappling with the undeniable reality of climate change still struggle with a philosophical aversion to intervening in energy markets — or, they would most likely say, in any markets at all. Left unsaid are federal tax breaks totaling as much as $20 billion a year that the fossil fuel industry enjoys and that Republicans, and some Democrats, support.
As the death spiral of a dying biosphere intensifies, the urgency of defeating destroying the GQP delayers and enablers in the midterms and beyond becomes exceptionally urgent.
Peter Brannen writes an incredible piece on paleoclimate science in The Atlantic.
Today, humans are injecting CO2 into the atmosphere at one of the fastest rates ever over this entire, near-eternal span. When hucksters tell you that the climate is always changing, they’re right, but that’s not the good news they think it is. “The climate system is an angry beast,” the late Columbia climate scientist Wally Broecker was fond of saying, “and we are poking it with sticks.”
The beast has only just begun to snarl. All of recorded human history—at only a few thousand years, a mere eyeblink in geologic time—has played out in perhaps the most stable climate window of the past 650,000 years. We have been shielded from the climate’s violence by our short civilizational memory, and our remarkably good fortune. But humanity’s ongoing chemistry experiment on our planet could push the climate well beyond those slim historical parameters, into a state it hasn’t seen in tens of millions of years, a world for which Homo sapiens did not evolve.
When there’s been as much carbon dioxide in the air as there already is today—not to mention how much there’s likely to be in 50 or 100 years—the world has been much, much warmer, with seas 70 feet higher than they are today. Why? The planet today is not yet in equilibrium with the warped atmosphere that industrial civilization has so recently created. If CO2 stays at its current levels, much less steadily increases, it will take centuries—even millennia—for the planet to fully find its new footing. The transition will be punishing in the near term and the long term, and when it’s over, Earth will look far different from the one that nursed humanity. This is the grim lesson of paleoclimatology: The planet seems to respond far more aggressively to small provocations than it’s been projected to by many of our models.
