While Florida residents were bracing for yet another deadly onslaught due to anthropogenic climate change, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a dire warning to the planet’s governments – they have barely ten years to reduce global warming and save the planet’s climate and environment. It is a futile U.N. effort to warn the world when one nation is Hell-bent on destroying the climate despite the existential threat of doing nothing - no matter how many millions will die.
To say America is doing nothing to combat climate change is simply wrong; America is doing everything to increase global warming and exacerbate climate change by orders from Trump to industry to go forward and increase carbon emissions at will. That is why it is beyond futile for the U.N. to warn the rest of the world to take greater steps to reduce carbon emissions. Sadly, their efforts, no matter how Herculean, still will not save the planet’s environment. According to the IPCC, there has to be a “historic” transformation to the way all nations operate and that is highly unlikely to happen. The IPCC report notes that:
“There is no documented historic precedent for the sweeping change to energy, transportation and other systems required to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
That 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of global temperature rise is the target to stop the existential threat to the Earth’s climate. And no, regardless of what Trump may claim, the U.N. report was not an attack on America or an effort to make Trump look like the monumental idiot he is. The report was requested 3 years ago as part of the Paris climate agreement that Trump pulled America out of as one of his first official acts as a murderous savage.
Trump says climate change is fake news, but one has to believe that the millions of Americans being adversely affected by the results of climate change likely have a different opinion; even in states like Florida that banned the term “climate change,” and North Carolina that banned the use of “storm surge” data in planning new developments.
According to the United Nations IPCC report, the world’s leaders have about a decade to get anthropogenic climate change under control. If not, exactly as many climate scientists have been predicting over the past decade – “It’s game over for the climate.”
Under normal circumstances it would be an understatement to call the task put forward by the United Nations climate experts daunting, but even “daunting” fails to take into consideration America’s goal of increasing its carbon emissions that make the rest of the world’s efforts futile. The executive director of the U.N. Environmental Program, Erik Solheim, tried to express the urgency of the IPCC’s report to inspire the planet’s nations to take major steps to save the climate. He said:
“It’s like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen. We have to put out the fire. Net zero must be the new global mantra.”
One of the co-chars of the IPCC panel, Jim Skea is also a professor at London’s Imperial College and he said:
“Frankly, we’ve delivered a message to the governments. It’s now their responsibility … to decide whether they can act on it. What we’ve done is said what the world needs to do.”
The transformation that is necessary, and described in the U.N. document, is “breathtaking” by any kind of measure. However, that sense of urgency would not exist today if any of the Earth’s governments had heeded 97 percent of climate scientists’ dire predictions at least two, if not three or four, decades ago – especially the world’s only “superpower” and leader America. It is worth stating again that the 3 percent of scientists claiming there is no such thing as anthropogenic climate change have been exposed as “biased frauds;” and their so-called research and data was deemed by other scientists as deeply flawed – probably according to orders from their dirty fossil fuel industry masters.
Apparently, some fools see the honest-to-dog doom and gloom report as inspiring hope because it infers that the line in the sand, the 1.5 degrees Celsius mark, can possibly be achieved. But even if emissions stopped today the excess of carbon will exist for up to 500 years in the planet’s oceans.
There is also a sense of hope that setting the target at 1.5 degrees Celsius as opposed to 2 degrees C “will galvanize even stronger climate action” from the Earth’s governments. All of that hope is wasted because the Earth’s second largest carbon emitter, America, is increasing its emissions at a breakneck pace by federal government fiat. Trump proclaimed climate change is a Chinese hoax and of course China denied the ridiculously absurd accusation. But by dog, Trump knows it is a hoax because he saw on television that somewhere on Earth it was cold outside.
It is a travesty that despite all manner of existential warnings, Trump made increasing the amount of America’s carbon emissions his apparent raison d’être beginning immediately after his poorly-attended inauguration. Of course he has been proceeding with the complete approval and utter joy from Republicans at all levels of government; including Republicans in states that have been hardest hit as a result of not doing anything.
One of those effects, the most recent storm to hit America, has killed at least 13 people, left a "tremendous number" of others unaccounted for, and left a trail of death and destruction across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. Hurricane Michael was a result of doing nothing and a portent of the new normal — such as being the fourth most powerful storm on record to hit the U.S., and also the first Category 4 hurricane to ever make landfall on the Florida Panhandle - what Governor Rick Scott called "the worst storm" that the area has ever seen. It is noteworthy to mention that this latest storm is typical according to decades-old climate scientists’ predictions and the loss of life and property will continue increasing around the Earth as a result of doing nothing to stop anthropogenic climate change.
Maybe the U.N. thinks a dire report will inspire the world’s leaders to make the “sweeping change to energy, transportation and other systems required to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius.” However, all of their efforts will be meaningless, even if they were somehow successful and drastically cut their carbon emissions, because the world’s second largest emitter is striving to be number one. In that sense, Trump and his Republican facilitators will bear the responsibility of destroying the climate and millions of human lives for decades, if not a century.
Of all the threats Trump poses, and he is a monumental threat on myriad levels, the threat he poses to the climate and the environment are incalculable and long lasting. Of course “the climate” and “the environment” will eventually self-correct, but that is not the case for generations of Americans and people of the world who will perish prematurely due to the effects of climate change. Is is no exaggeration to say that Trump is not only going to be guilty of killing, under a most conservative estimate, 80,000 American citizens and choking well over a million more per decade due to his attack on emission standards and environmental regulations, he will literally be responsible for killing millions of the world’s residents for generations to come.
Adolf Hitler is renowned for slaughtering 6 million human beings because of their religion and he is universally regarded as “a monster.” How much more of a monster, then, is Trump who is on a path to slaughter millions around the globe because he embraces a conspiracy theory perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry and Republicans? With important midterm elections on the near horizon, it is a question Democrats should be asking voters.