The Trump administration tried to pull a fast one on us last week by releasing a major, legally-mandated climate report on Black Friday when everyone would be too hungover on turkey and busy shopping to pay attention. For this science-denying administration, this tactic makes sense.
But instead of a quiet release with little notice, the report was on the front page of major newspapers across the country, was given a regular segments on CNN Friday, covered by network news broadcasts, and made it into Fox News and the WSJ.
What’s more, because the Trump administration hurried up the release, their own allies seemed unprepared. Heartland sent out a half-hearted release on Saturday, with three pitiful quotes blaming the Deep State for the report’s full-scale demolition of the facade of denial.
The only response mustered by the Koch’s Daily Caller was a piece complaining that the report uses an extreme emissions scenario to illustrate what the worst effects of unchecked warming might be, echoing the official White House response.
This is almost a fair criticism. The IPCC’s RCP 8.5 emissions pathway, used for the NCA’s high-end projections, assumes increased fossil fuel use, which doesn’t look realistic at this point. But the Trump administration is trying to increase fossil fuel use, so it’s working towards exactly that high emissions scenario future.
Breitbart’s primary coverage of the report consisted entirely of a story of reacting to incoming Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet about the report.
While Breitbart didn’t point it out, AOC, pretty much the new gold standard for Democratic calls for strong climate action, actually made a fundamental error in her tweet. “People are going to die if we don’t start addressing climate change ASAP,” she wrote. “It’s not enough to think it’s ‘important.’ We must make it urgent. That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, & why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy.”
Her problem is one of tense. The new report doesn’t say that climate change is going to impact people. It says it already is. The very first line of the report’s text says that “The impacts of climate change are already being felt in communities across the country.”
The next line of the report is “More frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.”
“Continuing to damage” means climate change already causing problems, present tense. And if it’s present in a report based on the science of the past 5 years, that means the damage has already happened.
Climate change is not a future-tense problem that’s going to come if we don’t address it with committees and new deals. It’s not even a present-tense problem that we can fight right now.
It’s a past-tense problem. One that we saw coming for decades. A threat that the people who were profiting off of it knew all about. A threat that we watched move from possible, to present, to past.
The NCA makes it clear that dangerous changes to the climate aren’t just coming.
They’re already here.
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