Seeing Is Believing – The Climate Crisis Is Now

The climate disaster is here; Earth is already becoming unlivable. Will governments act to stop this disaster from getting worse?

Oliver Milman, Andrew Witherspoon, Rita Liu, and Alvin Chang, 14 October 2021 (UK Guardian)

“The enormous, unprecedented pain and turmoil caused by the climate crisis is often discussed alongside what can seem like surprisingly small temperature increases – 1.5C or 2C hotter than it was in the era just before the car replaced the horse and cart…But the single digit numbers obscure huge ramifications…The world has already heated up by around 1.2C, on average, since the preindustrial era, pushing humanity beyond almost all historical boundaries…Through the burning of fossil fuels, we have now unmoored ourselves from our past...

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Since 1970, the Earth’s temperature has raced upwards faster than in any comparable period…No one is entirely sure how this horrifying experiment will end…[I]n the 2015 Paris climate agreement, nearly 200 countries agreed to limit the global temperature rise to “well below” 2C, with an aspirational goal to keep it to 1.5C. The latter target was fought for by smaller, poorer nations, aware that an existential threat of unlivable heatwaves, floods and drought hinged upon this ostensibly small increment…

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This year has provided bitter evidence that even current levels of warming are disastrous, with astounding floods in Germany and China, Hades-like fires from Canada to California to Greece and rain, rather than snow, falling for the first time at the summit of a rapidly melting Greenland…At 1.5C, about 14% of the world’s population will be hit by severe heatwaves once every five years. with this number jumping to more than a third of the global population at 2C…[T]he heat in tropical regions of the world will push societies to the limits…[and] could make parts of the Middle East too hot for humans to endure…” click here for more

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