Another dismal report on the current and projected state of climate change. This one noting we're more than halfway to putting a cool trillion new tons of carbon into the atmosphere which could translate into an additional 2° C or more in average global temperature. Convert that to Fahrenheit and adjust for polar amplification and you get about five to ten degrees of warming for more northerly regions, meaning ...
"The bottom line? Dangerous change, even loosely defined, is going to be hard to avoid," writes Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science and David Archer, a geoscientist at the University of Chicago, in an accompanying commentary in Nature. "Unless emissions begin to decline very soon, severe disruption to the climate system will entail expensive adaptation measures and may eventually require cleaning up the mess by actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere."
Here's an idea for newspapers struggling to regain their credibility after getting it hammered to shit over the last eight years: how about we just completely disregard the consensus of actual climate researchers, empirical data, and the last two elections, and instead present the polished propaganda of industry friendly carnival barkers without a shred of scientific training or journalistic integrity as if it were an equally well supported scientific view?
The New York Times exposes an internal document (PDF) from the Global Climate Coalition, a group funded by the oil and auto industries, that shows that their own scientists were confirming the reality of human-caused global warming and the effects of greenhouse gasses as early as 15 years ago even while publicly trying to dispute that reality.