Carbon combustion is causing our planet to heat up.
A lot.
If you’re not a Republican, you know this.
The effects of carbon combustion induced climate change are not off in the future, they’re right now, and they’re intensifying. Terrifyingly so.
Daisy Dunne, writing today for Carbon Brief, provides the details of new research that examined sea level data over the past quarter century:
The study, published in Nature, finds that ice loss from Antarctica has caused sea levels to rise by 7.6mm from 1992-2017, with two fifths of this increase occurring since 2012.
Forty percent of sea level rise attributable to Antarctic ice melt in the last twenty-five years, has occurred in just the last six:
… the new analysis finds that Antarctic ice melt is now driving sea level rise of 0.6mm a year – suggesting that the rate of melting has increased three-fold in just five years.
That is, the rising of the oceans is accelerating.
Even if we somehow could switch off all carbon combustion immediately, this process will continue:
Even if carbon dioxide emissions came to a sudden halt, the carbon dioxide already in Earth’s atmosphere could continue to warm our planet for hundreds of years, according to Princeton University-led research published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study suggests that it might take a lot less carbon than previously thought to reach the global temperature scientists deem unsafe.
The researchers simulated an Earth on which, after 1,800 billion tons of carbon entered the atmosphere, all carbon dioxide emissions suddenly stopped. Scientists commonly use the scenario of emissions screeching to a stop to gauge the heat-trapping staying power of carbon dioxide. Within a millennium of this simulated shutoff, the carbon itself faded steadily with 40 percent absorbed by Earth’s oceans and landmasses within 20 years and 80 percent soaked up at the end of the 1,000 years.
By itself, such a decrease of atmospheric carbon dioxide should lead to cooling. But the heat trapped by the carbon dioxide took a divergent track.
After a century of cooling, the planet warmed by 0.37 degrees Celsius (0.66 Fahrenheit) during the next 400 years as the ocean absorbed less and less heat. While the resulting temperature spike seems slight, a little heat goes a long way here. Earth has warmed by only 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.
And as we know, the official policy makers in the US are moving in the opposite direction:
U.S. officials plan to argue that fossil fuels are key to fighting climate change
This position is, it hardly needs to be noted, literally insane.
To put a finer point on it, if anyone you know votes Republican, they are complicit in mass murder. On a global scale:
Globally, the number of reported weather-related natural disasters has more than tripled since the 1960s. Every year, these disasters result in over 60 000 deaths, mainly in developing countries.
Rising sea levels and increasingly extreme weather events will destroy homes, medical facilities and other essential services. More than half of the world's population lives within 60 km of the sea. People may be forced to move, which in turn heightens the risk of a range of health effects, from mental disorders to communicable diseases.
Increasingly variable rainfall patterns are likely to affect the supply of fresh water. A lack of safe water can compromise hygiene and increase the risk of diarrhoeal disease, which kills over 500 000 children aged under 5 years, every year. In extreme cases, water scarcity leads to drought and famine.
There is simply no other option but to switch entirely to renewable sources of energy, right now. We lost the opportunity for a gradual transition from carbon combustion more than a half century ago.
If the survival of every person you know and care about is not enough reason to vote Democratic, I’m not sure what it would take to convince you.