Yes, that title is a direct quote from this BBC article online. It’s beyond frightening. The greenhouse gas needle is way past the red dial danger zone. And no one in the media during this election campaign is talking about it. Because, horse races are easier to cover, I guess. Meanwhile planet earth is not waiting around for our media and political elites to take notice of the world of sh*t that we are mucking around in as I write these words.
Measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii went up by more than three parts per million(ppm) in 2015.
Scientists say the spike is due to a combination of human activities and the El Niño weather pattern.
Put another way, this represents an explosion in the growth of CO2 in our atmosphere.
In another first, NOAA found that 2015 was the fourth straight year in which carbon dioxide concentrations grew by more than 2 ppm, according to Pieter Tans, who leads NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.
“Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years,” Tans said in a press release. “It’s explosive compared to natural processes.” […]
According to Tans, the current rate of increase in carbon dioxide levels is 200 times faster than the last time the planet saw such a sustained increase, which was between 17,000 and 11,000 years ago, when there was an 80 ppm increase during that timespan.
Two hundred times faster than the last time there was a sustained rise in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Back then, it took 6000 years for atmospheric CO2 levels to rise 80 parts per million. That works out to .013 ppm a year. Our current rate over the past five years exceeds 2 ppm per year.
Is it any wonder that the hottest year on record was 2015, beating the prior record which occurred in — 2014. Or that of the ten hottest years on record, nine of them occurred since 2003. Yet, no one in the media is talking about this threat to our nation and the world, and certainly little if any attention during the current campaign is being spent on addressing the threat of climate change, not even during the Democratic Party debates.
Leonardo DiCaprio spoke about climate change for a longer amount of time at the Academy Awards than the presidential candidates have in the debates. In the 18 debates held so far, moderators have asked about everything from Super Bowl picks to flower arrangements, while posing only a handful of questions on climate. They ignored it entirely in the December debates, even though the world had just united around the landmark climate agreement in Paris. This must change. […]
People are paying attention. A bipartisan group of 21 Florida mayors, whose constituents are already coping with impacts of climate change, sent a letter to the debate moderators calling on them to ask questions on sea level rise and climate change. The news outlets– Washington Post, Univision and CNN– should follow-through.
I do not care who you support, this is a topic that needs to be brought up at every debate going forward. We know the Republicans are not going to bother, but why are the Democratic debates ignoring climate change? As even the author of The Hill article noted, this must change. Unfortunately, the next scheduled Democratic Party debate is not until April 9th, far too long to wait. I urge you to contact the DNC and your Congressional representatives and demand a separate debate on Climate Change be held at the earliest opportunity.
The DNC Main phone number: 202-863-8000
Twitter accounts: @TheDemocrats, @DWStweets, @BernieSanders, @HillaryClinton
Worse, lots of ecosystems/species are fucked along with/by us.
I do not care who you support, …
I do because it won’t be substantively included in any debate when it’s in the interests of the leading DEM candidate (and her corporate backers) to kick this can down the road. Those who care already know which side the candidates are on. And personally, I’m not interested in hearing HRC parse, spin, lie and drone on that she is sorta, kinds, really an environmentalist. (Yeah, that’s why Al Gore is persona non grata among the DC elite DEMs).
Bill McKibben – Bernie Wins another Primary – This one on Climate Change.
Why millennials may not be interested in holding hands around a post-primary campfire when they are the kindling being thrown on the flames. Eh?
WaPo Transcript:
It needs more attention, and action, but it is being talked about in the Democratic debates (at least the last one).
Cheers,
Scott.
Your comment about the media covering the presidential campaign because it is easier is spot on. Now that MSNBC has gone the way of all flesh and succumbed to the pursuit of ratings over all other concerns, there is nowhere to go on Television for ….for lack of a better word…news. The systemic failure of our national press to even attempt to perform their traditional role has consequences. One of them may be Donny Trump, unfortunately another may be the accelerating dismantling of the Biosphere. One we keep track of daily as though it was a looong football game, the other we virtually ignore. Someone please convince an old man that there is still reason to hope for the best.
send him/her my way next.
For anyone following temperature data, the last year has been terrifying. Each new month is “the warmest month on record”. We’re reaching 2°C above normal on daily readings for the planet. This past Wednesday shattered high-temp records across the northeast, and was the warmest day ever recorded in winter in Boston. That’s the warmest day out of 13000+ on record.
Alaska has been 10°F above normal this winter. The arctic as a whole is just unimaginably warm. And do you know how much methane is stored in Arctic permafrost or sea-beds?
I’m trying to think of what real-world equivalent would be covered by the national media with the seriousness and alarm that the climate crisis demands right now. I’m thinking things like:
A) Virulent pathogen shuts down major city, region in chaos, nation in terror.
B) Super quake, tsunami devastates Pacific northwest. Tens of thousands dead or missing, millions cut off.
C) Terrorists deploy dirty bomb in Manhattan.
That’s where we are at. Today. And it’s only going to get worse. But since the consequences are still developing far outside the attention-span of the “news-cycle”, denial is the order of the day.
I am very pessimistic about this issue. It is not difficult to convince me that we are doomed. Whenever I hear reports like this I think “Whatever” because in my heart I believe near term human extinction is in the cards.
Isn’t there already some reason for optimism? Doesn’t the President deserve enormous credit on this issue?
He made the automakers agree to make more fuel efficient cars when he bailed them out. He took a huge whack of stimulus money and invested it in renewable energy and the business has boomed. Congress wouldn’t help so he dusted off the Clean Air act and used the EPA to mandate carbon reductions. He took those accomplishments to China where he convinced the Chinese that the US and China had to take the lead in Paris. He leveraged that agreement into the Paris deal, the first real global agreement to address the problem.
We can all agree that it is not nearly enough and there is no time left, yada, yada, yada.
It was a start. The first real start. If we are going to discuss climate change, praise and promote the deal, and discuss what the United States has to do to reach and even exceed the targets. The targets that are too little, too late are not going to be easy to achieve. There will be pain.
All we can do is hope that it is not too little too late and make the difficult choices that will be required to reach the too little, too late targets.
Then we will have to do more. But it is a start. I’m going to be optimistic that we are on the way. A global start and a process to take us forward.
(I’m warning anybody who might want to trash my fragile optimism that my alternative is to crawl into bed and pull the blankets over my head. Take your fucking reality someplace else. Thanks.)