Climate Science Update: Some not good news

The New York Times writes:

The impacts of global warming are appearing faster than expected, according to a major new scientific report. It could soon become much harder to cope.

The dangers of climate change are mounting so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt, creating a harrowing future in which floods, fires and famine displace millions, species disappear and the planet is irreversibly damaged, a major new scientific report has concluded.

The report released Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, is the most detailed look yet at the threats posed by global warming. It concludes that nations aren’t doing nearly enough to protect cities, farms and coastlines from the hazards that climate change has already unleashed, such as record droughts and rising seas, let alone from the even greater disasters in store as the planet keeps heating up.

Written by 270 researchers from 67 countries, the report is “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” said António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general. “With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”

Global temperatures have already increased by an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, as humans have pumped heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil and gas for energy, and cutting down forests.

Many leaders, including President Biden, have vowed to limit total global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic climate impacts increases significantly.

But achieving that goal would require nations to all but eliminate their fossil-fuel emissions by 2050, and most are far off-track. The world is currently on pace to warm somewhere between 2 degrees and 3 degrees Celsius this century, experts have estimated.  

Poor nations are far more exposed to climate risks than rich countries. .... That disparity has fueled a contentious debate: what the industrialized nations most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions owe developing countries. Low-income nations want financial help, both to defend against future threats and to compensate for damages they can’t avoid.

Compare and contrast: Democrats and Republicans

Democrats are concerned about climate change and they try to deal with it. Republicans and polluters effectively oppose and block government efforts to deal with it. The big lies there are (i) unregulated free markets running free and wild will solve the problem, while (ii) government regulation will make climate change worse and enslave us all in evil socialism. So, people who want more climate change can vote Republican. People who want less can go pound sand.

In the recent Republican 11 point plan to save America from evil tyrant Democratic Party cannibalistic pedophiles and their evil socialism, the word environment does not appear once, while the word climate appears once in this sentence:

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.  

So, there you have it. The weather is always changing. That's a blistering insight. 

The Republican plan is to not be hysterical or adopt nutty policies. That's Republican Party policy no matter how much economic damage climate change inflicts on the US or how polluting the saved jobs are. In the Republican mind, nutty policies are ones that would attempt to actually deal seriously with climate change. For Republicans, there is no such thing as the tragedy of the commons[1], just like there is no such thing as the common good, general welfare or public interest. For Republican elites, there is only me, myself and I.

Logically, Americans can reasonably expect the gridlock on climate change (and most everything else) in Washington to continue as long as the climate science denying Republican Party remains as ideologically rigid, incompetent and corrupt in its raging hate of government and its all-consuming authoritarian culture war mindset.

Or, is that criticism of the Republican Party way over the top? In view of the 'excellent' climate results [sarcasm] we see today, should it be up to individuals and the private sector, not government, to deal with regulations and climate change?

Footnote: 

1. Wikipedia: In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. .... Although open-access resource systems may collapse due to overuse (such as in over-fishing), many examples have existed and still do exist where members of a community with regulated access to a common resource co-operate to exploit those resources prudently without collapse, or even creating "perfect order."