August 15, 2021: Code Red for Humanity

 

8/15/21: Climate change is in the news. Unless you watch the Fox channel. Then Hunter Biden is in the news!! 

Young Mr. Biden is by no stretch of the imagination a pillar of rectitude. We are only saying that climate change might be a much, much, much

 

BIGGER STORY. 

Evidence continues to pile up. On August 11, we learned that there were 100 large fires burning in fifteen states, mainly cross the drought-stricken West. The Dixie Fire, the largest, had already incinerated 550 homes in California, and another 14,000 may be in the fire’s path. In Montana, at least 2,000 people were ordered to evacuate the town of Lame Deer, as flames from a forest fire approached, and 230 square miles of real estate went up in flames. 

We also learn that Republican lawmakers plan to ignore the threat for as long as they can. Florida Sen. Rick Scott will wait to act until rising sea levels drown out Miami Beach. 

He’s not worried at all – even though the recent U.N. report, authored by 234 scientists from around the world, warns that humanity is staring down calamity if we fail to act boldly and fast. 

“We clearly have an issue over climate change,” Scott recently admitted to reporters. “We clearly have to focus on it. But the way to do it is you grow your economy so you have money to invest.” 

When asked if more needed to be done on capturing methane, for instance, something President Obama tried to do, and President Trump decided to reverse, Scott replied, “I don’t want to raise taxes on anybody.” 

Scott might as well have been spewing methane gas. Still, progress of a sort! Loser Don, during four years in office, consistently mixed up weather and climate, and called climate change a “hoax.” Now, even GOP stalwarts realize the handwriting is on the environmental wall. They can’t ignore it. 

So they’ll stall. Taxes. Scott decided to talk about taxes, instead. 

 

Code red for humanity. 

Sen. “Snowball” Jim Inhofe, the nitwit from Oklahoma, remains unconvinced. In fact, so many reports have come out – warning that humanity is facing a growing crisis – that Inhofe says he’s tired of all the scientists and their damnable facts and he’s going to ignore them for fun. He says the scientists are always wrong and he doesn’t see why anyone would take 234 scientists from around the world seriously. 

You can’t fool “Snowball” Jim. That’s for sure. He once packed an actual snowball – in January – in Washington D.C. And that “proved” to his satisfaction that climate change couldn’t be real. 

(Also, he gets a lot of campaign cash from Big Oil and Big Coal.) 

Ol’ Snowball and his kind can’t be convinced by NASA reports – or anything else – that climate change is a threat. Dire reports from NOAA don’t keep Jim up late at night. When the Germans say catastrophic flooding was caused by climate change, Inhofe ignores what is said. Massive fires in California and across the West fill the air over Salt Lake City and Denver with smoke, even though they’re a thousand miles away. Schools in Provo, Utah, are forced to cancel outdoor sports. The coach at one high school explains his decision, saying of the air, “If you were out in it for just a half-hour, you felt completely crummy.” Summer camps in Washington State close. The entire town of Greenville, California is erased by fire. British Columbia is ablaze. Experts attribute record burns to climate change. Greece is burning. Turkey, too. Inhofe isn’t worried because he made a snowball in January, which proved everything was cool.

Greenville, California, after the fire.

 

Leaders from 195 countries signed onto the U.N. report, which sounded a “code red for humanity.” That doesn’t mean all 195 will agree on what to do, or when, or who has to pay. They do recognize there’s an elephant in the room. Unlike Inhofe and Scott, they’re not trying to convince people the pachyderm is a fish. 

“Today’s report makes for sobering reading, and it is clear that the next decade is going to be pivotal to securing the future of our planet,” admitted U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a statement. “We know what must be done to limit global warming – consign coal to history and shift to clean energy sources, protect nature and provide climate finance for countries on the frontline.” 

At least one scientist expressed hope that the stark warnings contained in this 3,000 page report would make it “impossible to ignore.” She clearly doesn’t understand what a dolt Sen. Inhofe is. 

Inhofe and his kind might not get it. Automobile manufacturers do, as they awake to the threat posed to their old business models. BMW has announced it will have 25 fully-electric or hybrid models ready to roll by 2023. “We expect to see a steep growth curve towards 2025: Sales of our electrified vehicles should increase by an average of 30 percent every year,” said company CEO Harald Krüger. 

Inhofe doesn’t care. 

Trump never got it and never will.

 

Loser Don remains as ill-informed on the topic today as he was on the day he took office – a level he maintained throughout his time in the White House. He has the same grasp on the science today, as your ordinary sweet potato. 

National Geographic described the U.N. report as “sobering.” The climate deniers decided to go out and have another round of drinks. The report was based on 14,000 surveys by experts from around the globe. The deniers didn’t care. “We can link extreme weather to climate change in the same way we can link smoking to cancer,” Friederike Otto, one of the report’s main authors and a climate change researcher at Oxford University, explained. 

Asked if he believed the report, Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota scoffed and said, “I always consider the source.” 

So, let’s do that. Let’s consider the source. Or: sources. “I feel strongly that the public needs to know that dangerous climate change is here and now,” Michael Wehner, an extreme weather researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explained to reporters. He wrote the extreme weather projections for the 2013 U.N. report and is a lead author of the newest report out today. Parts of China, he noted, had 25 inches of rain in one day. 

That was a source.

 

Hurricanes have become stronger and dump more rain when they hit. The same is true of cyclones. “All regions of the world are affected by some extremes. Changes are happening everywhere,” Sonia Seneviratne, an environmental scientist at the Institute for Atmosphere and Climate in Zurich, said. “They’re also multiplying with increasing global warming.” 

That was a source.

 

In the Pacific Northwest, hundreds of towns and cities set high temperature records earlier this summer, and may set them again. Right-wing types might want to scare you with stories about rioters taking control of the Portland, Oregon downtown. Scientists can tell you that Portland broke its old all-time high temperature by ten degrees on one blistering July day. By 2050, temperatures in the region are expected to climb an average of 5.8° degrees, over levels from before the Industrial Revolution. Many of the damaging developments are already cooked into the books. In fact, Wehner warns that some parts of the planet will become “unlivable” by 2100. 

That, too, is a source.

 

Scientists say the evidence of a growing threat to life on this planet is “unequivocal,” and the threat is manmade. 

That is a source. 

 

“There is no time for delay and no room for excuses.” 

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warns that we must embrace transformational change. He doesn’t say how. No one in their right mind would argue it will be easy. Yet Guterres is clear. “We owe this to the entire human family,” he says. “There is no time for delay and no room for excuses.” 

“Unless we make immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5C [the level at which experts believe catastrophic changes will be clear] will be beyond reach,” Ko Barrett, senior adviser for climate at NOAA, tells the Washington Post. “Each bit of warming will intensify the impacts we are likely to see.” 

Each of the last four decades on the planet has been hotter than the one before. And that’s a source.

 

Human-driven climate change is now “an established fact,” the authors of the U.N. report insist. 

“It’s now become actually quite obvious to people what is happening, because we see it with our own eyes,” says Corinne Le Quéré, a professor of climate science at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. “You don’t have to have a PhD,” she tells the Post. You don’t need to be a climate scientist. You just need to be a person who looks out the window.” 

Loser Donald never bothers to look.