Climate change is happening now, and is accelerating
I found this comment by Glen55 in the diary yesterday, “Obama’s critique of Sanders”:
“You missed the entire point of Obama’s speech: THE WORLD IS BETTER NOW THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN.
That is beyond serious dispute.”
And as of this writing, 90 Kossacks rec’d it.
Not one Hillary person countered it out of 460 recommends.
I am astounded any semi-informed person would make this comment, much less that it would be rec’d by 90 people on a Democratic political blog that prides itself on being “reality-based”.
Are you rec-ers so blinded by partisan hero-worship that you can’t acknowledge the truth staring you in the face? Or do you live under a rock? It seems you take it personally that since Obama is president, the world MUST be better because he and the Blue Team are so awesome.
I am NOT saying it's Obama’s fault — it’s way more complicated than one person, even one party -- but by any “serious” metric, the world is not “better now that it has ever been.” And that is beyond serious dispute. Unless you live in blissfully ignorant LaLa land. So much for the adults in the room.
First off, and most importantly, since it seems too many of you have not noticed,
Earth’s 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Globally-averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the previous mark set in 2014 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius). Only once before, in 1998, has the new record been greater than the old record by this much……
“Climate change is the challenge of our generation, and NASA’s vital work on this important issue affects every person on Earth,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “Today’s announcement not only underscores how critical NASA’s Earth observation program is, it is a key data point that should make policy makers stand up and take notice - now is the time to act on climate.”
Climate change and it’s consequences trumps everything: it is and will affect every single aspect of our individual and social lives. It is affecting our personal and national finances, our food supply, our social order,
And climate change and warming is happening faster than expected. It is not good. In fact it is catastrophically horrible. www.rollingstone.com/…
Along with climate change we are getting acidification of the oceans. Last year there were reports of mass extinctions of the oceans, www.nytimes.com/… The oceans die, we die.
I don’t want to trouble your pretty little heads blissing out with visions of dancing at inaugural balls, but even if climate acceleration were not looming over every facet of our lives, the world is STILL not better than ever. Violence is worse too:
Now the data is in. And yes, it turns out the world’s most violent conflicts got a lot bloodier in 2014 — almost 30 percent bloodier, in fact.
According to an analysis of data from the world’s 20 most lethal wars last year, at least 163,000 people died in conflict. That compares to just under 127,000 in the 20 worst wars the previous year, a rise of 28.7 percent.
That’s a pretty disturbing spike by anyone’s terms. And if you look at the first few months of 2015, the violence doesn’t seem to be waning….
What’s even more worrying is that this seems to be part of an ongoing trend that now goes back eight years. According to the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), global violence — as defined by a range of measures from conflict deaths, to displaced persons, to homicide rates — has been rising since 2007. blogs.reuters.com/...
Then there is hunger, world-wide, and right here in the US:
There is a hunger crisis taking place across the United States, and it is likely to get even worse. As of 2012, 49 million Americans suffer from food insecurity, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as lack of access to “enough food for an active, healthy life.” Nearly one-third of the afflicted are children. And millions of them don’t even have access to food stamps, according to a new report from the anti-hunger organization Feeding America. www.msnbc.com/...
I could go on but I hope I have made my point. Wake up and deal with reality! Things are not hunky-dory in the world. Yes, on social equality metrics things are better for many but it won’t matter a whit if we don’t aggressively attend to the monster in the room — climate change.
It frightens me that so many many people here seem so oblivious, but then it also partly explains the flame wars between the Sanders and Clinton sides. If they aren’t knowledgable on this topic ,that is plastered all over the media, what else are they blissfully unaware? If they don’t care to understand it’s significance, of course that flavors their politics. In some respects we are separated by an abyss — perhaps an abyss of knowledge and dealing with reality based on that knowledge.
* changed from “deniers” to more passive “ignorers”, to be more accurate and less inflammatory
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