If you do not pay attention, then how can you prepare yourself for what is to come?
This critical moment in time is, our last chance to act before it is too late, most will scroll past this diary, and other stories like it on this site and I would like to know why.
I’m not sure why Kossacks are more outraged by someone calling someone else a name or argue over a verb or noun or falling for its newest distraction that gets hundreds of recommends and means nothing in global mass extinction.
He is locking children in cages, he is proud of his treason and enthusiastic in his war on the fight against climate change. Those are impeachable offenses to me. Why we are dithering is beyond me.
I doubt at times that we as a species will save ourselves in time, tears well in my eyes often. But I desperately want justice for crimes against the planet for those who withheld evidence that we could have used to have a livable climate.
I do not want these loathsome climate change enabling people to escape justice. I still seethe that BP was able to skate after killing large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico.
My dream is that we act, perhaps we could avoid a 3C and above temperature rise if we quickly transition to clean energy. But Trump is robbing us of the geological time necessary to act, time that we will never get back. Bolsanaro is killing the lungs of the earth, and, we do not have enough time to reforest the Amazon.
I fight on because it is the only chance we have to stop the great dying. I fight on to see the selfish that allowed this calamity to suffer. I do not know what else I can do individually, but collectively, we can do wonders if we focus.
Rant over, the story is below.
My anxiety runneth over today.
"All it would've taken is for one prominent fossil fuel CEO to know this was about more than just shareholder profits and a question about our legacy. But now because of the cost of inaction—what I call the 'procrastination penalty'—we face a far more uphill battle." Micheal Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University
Let's be honest. Collectively, Americans are not ever going to give up our extravagant lifestyles until we are forced to. Despite green technology increasingly coming online worldwide, we continue to be baked into an energy system that will be difficult to extricate ourselves despite the constant code red alarms ringing from scientists that fossil fuel use needs to end now, not by 2050 or 2030, but 2019.
Inside Climate News reported on an Exxon scandal that has again emerged in the media. What's different with the story now is how accurate their climate models were in 1982. They knew for decades that burning oil and coal would cause a life-ending 3-5C world for those of us alive today.
CO2 emissions continue to rise while tipping points in the Arctic horrify climate scientists. If we lose the Arctic, we lose the world. It's as simple as that. And the science and data confirm that the Arctic system has begun to collapse.
What is disturbing to me is that oil companies knew humanity could not survive a 3C world and deliberately withheld the information from us when we could actually do something about it. And here we are, staring down into the abyss.
Exxon fucking knew!!
"Over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged," Cohen wrote in September 1982, reporting on Exxon's own analysis of climate models. It was that a doubling of the carbon dioxide blanket in the atmosphere would produce average global warming of 3 degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees C (equal to 5 degrees Fahrenheit plus or minus 1.7 degrees F).
"There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth's climate," he wrote, "including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere."
Brian Khan of Earther writes about Exxon’s crimes against humanity.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide sets a new record every year. This year’s cracked the ominous milestone of 415 parts per million (ppm) thanks to ever rising emissions from human activities. The sharp rise might seem like something nobody could’ve predicted but there’s at least one group of scientists that were on the money 37 years ago: Exxon’s ace team of scientists.
Internal memos unearthed in InsideClimate’s Pulitzer-winning 2015 investigation into the company revealed all sorts of solid science being done even as the oil giant sowed doubt in public. Bloomberg reporter Tom Randall revisited the memos in light of the world’s new carbon dioxide milestone and tweeted a graph from one showing just how much Exxon knew what our future would look like.
The prediction is a pretty damn good one. The world is now about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was and carbon dioxide levels are at 415 ppm. The estimate was part of Exxon’s “high case” scenario, which assumed fossil fuel use would quicken and that the world would be able to tap new reserves in the late 2000s from at the time unreachable shale gas. The memo also warned that the extra carbon dioxide would enhance the greenhouse effect and that an “increase in absorbed energy via this route would warm the earth’s surface causing changes in climate affecting atmospheric and ocean temperatures, rainfall patterns, soil moisture, and over centuries potentially melting the polar ice caps.”
snip
In a non-sociopathic hands, the chart should have been a warning that increasing fossil fuel production and use was putting the world in grave danger. But instead, it was something Exxon buried in internal documents as the company turned to questioning climate science in an effort to preserve its bottom line.