'One of the hardest facts to grasp about climate change is this: No matter what we do now, it's almost certain to get worse in the future'
The big picture: Even under the most optimistic scenario for carbon emission reductions — one far more ambitious than anything the world is currently on a path for — global average temperatures are projected to keep rising until the 2050s and, while they begin to dip, still end the century higher than they are now.
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this year isn't the hottest summer of your life, but the coldest summer of the rest of your life
- According to a December survey, 40% of Americans feel helpless about climate change and 29% feel hopeless, while a separate 2020 poll by the American Psychiatric Association found that more than half of Americans are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their mental health.
- The younger the respondent, the more likely they reported higher levels of climate anxiety.
- Analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note to investors last month that the "movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline."
Driving the news: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released on Monday contained a few silver linings amid a slew of generally bad news about the science of global warming.
- Improved science about climate sensitivity — how much we can expect the planet to warm given a doubling of preindustrial atmospheric carbon concentration — enabled the IPCC to dial back the likelihood of the most extreme warming scenarios. axios.com/...
July 2021 Was Officially The Hottest Month On Record
Last month “outdid itself” on the heat scale, a NOAA official said.
Meteor Blades from 2015:
Get used to it. You're going to see a lot more of this headline in your lifetime: Hottest year ever. An excerpt:
Reports that last year was the hottest on record, this year is likely to surpass that record and next year is likely to be hotter still generates the kind of knowledge that leads some people to despair. Combining the heat reports with news about accelerating melting in the Antarctic, stalling oceanic currents, bigger swarms of Arctic mosquitoes, starving polar bears and hints there will be soon be climate-forced migration of hundreds of millions of people can turn the despair into desperation. And that can lead to paralysis or an attitude of eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we fry.
The antidote for this is stepped-up activism dedicated to abandoning the fossil-fuel economy and speeding up the transformation of our energy system and the economic ideology that underpins it.
This will take greater resolve at every level of government and commerce. The climate-change deniers and their cousins, the climate-policy delayers, are not going to take action on their own. And they aren't going to get the hell out of the way of those who are taking action unless we force the issue. As abolitionist Frederick Douglass would surely say if he were still with us, getting change requires making demands of those in power and replacing those who continue to resist and equivocate. Achieving that will take a relentless effort, both in electoral and street politics.
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World map showing differences between July temperatures this year compared to the July average from 1981 to 2010
- The warming is happening even faster than scientists previously thought, and the latest projections have us reaching or exceeding 1.5 degrees -- a key threshold scientists say is critical to stay below -- within the next decade or two. www.cnn.com/...
The only way to stop the warming is to end greenhouse gas emissions: The longer it takes, the hotter it gets
The writers in Climate Brief work to keep the Daily Kos community informed and engaged with breaking news about the climate crisis around the world while providing inspiring stories of environmental heroes, opportunities for direct engagement, and perspectives on the intersection of climate activism with spirituality, politics, and the arts.