The Republican Party is openly misogynistic, but that's not the worst of it. The Republican Party is openly racist, and that's not the worst of it. The Republican Party has been waging class warfare for decades, and wants to take away people's health care and retirement benefits, and that's not the worst of it, either. The Republican Party is undermining national security, has made the United States an international pariah, and is addressing catastrophic gun violence by murderously making it harder to enact laws to stop it, and that also is not the worst of it. The Republican Party is trying to destroy democracy itself, and while that's the immediate crisis, even that's not the worst of it. Humanity is facing its greatest threat ever, and not only is the Republican Party not helping, but it's actively and deliberately making it worse.
Republicans seem to think climate change is a joke.
Very funny:
Scorching temperatures around the world last month tied August 2019 as the second-hottest August on record and capped off the hottest Northern Hemisphere summer (June through August) since 1880. The heat also impacted Arctic sea ice coverage, shrinking it to the second smallest for the month on record.
Smile!
Absolutely nothing resembling modern-day global warming has happened on Earth for at least the past 2,000 years, a new study published today in Nature confirms. Since the birth of Jesus Christ, the climate has sometimes naturally changed—some parts of the world have briefly cooled, and some have briefly warmed—but it has never changed as it’s changing now. Never once until the Industrial Revolution did temperatures surge in the same direction everywhere at the same time. They’re doing so now, the study finds.
Drawing on a huge database of climate-recording objects from all over the world—including tree rings, cave formations, and ancient pollen trapped in lake mud—the study concludes that 98 percent of Earth’s surface experienced its hottest period of the past 2,000 years within living memory. That uniform heat spike “is unprecedented over the Common Era,” it says.
This latest finding may not surprise most climate scientists, who suspect that the planet is as hot now as it’s ever been in at least the past 125,000 years. But it may shock some politicians, who have downplayed modern-day climate change by talking about those past shifts. “The climate has always been changing. There has never been a time when the climate has not changed,” said Senator Marco Rubio at a Republican presidential debate in 2016.
It takes effort to ignore the facts:
The same oceans that nourished human evolution are poised to unleash misery on a global scale unless the carbon pollution destabilising Earth's marine environment is brought to heel, warns a draft UN report obtained by AFP.
Destructive changes already set in motion could see a steady decline in fish stocks, a hundred-fold or more increase in the damages caused by superstorms, and hundreds of millions of people displaced by rising seas, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "special report" on oceans and Earth's frozen zones, known as the cryosphere.
As the 21st century unfolds, melting glaciers will first give too much and then too little to billions who depend on them for fresh water, it finds.
Without deep cuts to manmade emissions, at least 30 percent of the northern hemisphere's surface permafrost could melt by century's end, unleashing billions of tonnes of carbon and accelerating global warming even more.
These reports are among many from just the past few months:
Sharp and potentially devastating temperature rises of 3C to 5C in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement, research has found.
Winter temperatures at the north pole are likely to rise by at least 3C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and there could be further rises to between 5C and 9C above the recent average for the region, according to the UN.
Such changes would result in rapidly melting ice and permafrost, leading to sea level rises and potentially to even more destructive levels of warming. Scientists fear Arctic heating could trigger a climate “tipping point” as melting permafrost releases the powerful greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, which in turn could create a runaway warming effect.
But Republicans laugh. Because wanting to do something about it is funny:
Climate change is not only having a devastating impact on the environments we live in, but also on respect for human rights globally, the UN has warned.
The UN rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, cited the civil wars sparked by a warming planet and the plight of indigenous people in an Amazon ravaged by wildfires and rampant deforestation.
She also denounced attacks on environmental activists, particularly in Latin America, and the abuse aimed at high-profile figures such as the teenage campaigner Greta Thunberg.
“The world has never seen a threat to human rights of this scope,” she told the UN human rights council in Geneva.
Unlike in the very recent past, at least some Republicans do now sometimes go through the motions of pretending to care, but while Democrats are actually trying to enact legislation, Republicans are stoping them. At the national level:
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday that the Senate will not take up a House bill that would force President Trump to keep the U.S. in the Paris climate agreement.
And at the state level:
For a brief moment, the standoff in Oregon over climate change legislation seemed like an amusing bit of Wild West political theater. Last week, rather than stomach a losing vote on the bill, Republicans in the state Senate escaped—scattering to Idaho, according to rumors, maybe Montana—to deny Democrats a quorum, which is required to pass any legislation. When the governor threatened to send state troopers to bring them back to work, one of the “Absent Eleven” threatened violent resistance: “Send bachelors and come heavily armed,” blustered Brian Boquist.
Because they prefer the easy money:
The 11 missing GOP senators have particularly strong ties to industry players fighting the cap-and-trade bill. More than 65 percent of their campaign funding has come from corporations, including Koch Industries, whose subsidiary Georgia-Pacific operates mills that would be regulated under the cap-and-trade bill. According to Davis’s calculations, over the last decade companies affected by the legislation have given $117,619 to the campaigns of the 11 senators who fled, compared to $43,250 to current Democratic state senators.
Just as they do at the national level:
Unmissable behind the elected Republicans stand other interests: the oil, gas and coal industries, which together are some of the most influential donors to Republican candidates.
The big-money supporters got a return on their investment last week, when 22 Republican senators whose campaigns have collected more than $10m in oil, gas and coal money since 2012 sent a letter to the president urging him to withdraw from the Paris deal.
With climate change increasingly becoming an important voting issue, more and more Republicans will make that effort to pretend to be doing something about it. But their actions speak for themselves. Democratic presidential candidates have serious plans to address climate change. Republicans don’t. And won’t. And that alone is why it is imperative that Democrats sweep next year’s elections, from the national level to the state and local levels, and from the executive branches to the legislative. Republicans are creating and exacerbating new and unnecessary crises and catastrophes, while making the biggest of all of them more and more likely and much worse.