(AP)

UPDATE: Via Brad Blog, Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research defined specifically how the climate crisis magnified the Oklahoma tornado:

The main climate change connection is via the basic instability of the low level air that creates the convection and thunderstorms in the first place.
Warmer and moister conditions are the key for unstable air.

The climate change effect is probably only a 5 to 10% effect in terms of the instability and subsequent rainfall, but it translates into up to a 32% effect in terms of damage.

–
As we observe the aftermath of the horrifying tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, I can’t help but to feel simultaneously crushed by the loss and brutally angry by the disease that likely produced it. For so many reasons, including personal experiences with similar tragedy, my heart goes out to the people of Oklahoma City as they struggle with the catastrophic, practically atomic destruction in their community.

Although it’s times like these when Americans invariably rise to the occasion and affirm our commitment to our national community. We always do. Americans, more often than not, stick together and help those who can’t help themselves, whether by the collective participation in government or by personal and immediate assistance. We’re good at it.

However, this is where I can’t help but to feel a powerful anger. I’m not supposed to write this yet but as I connect the scenes of horror in Oklahoma with so many other worsening weather-related disasters, I wonder if our American community will actually band together to cast aside ignorance and political intransigence to actually mitigate the disease, the climate crisis, instead of simply reacting to the aftermath of its symptoms.

Yes, dammit, when it comes to the increased frequency and severity of these kinds of storms we ought to be immediately asking serious questions of the people who, for decades, have not only resisted action on the climate crisis, but who’ve deliberately injected misinformation and conspiracy-mongering into the debate in order to finance their re-election campaigns, while pacifying our human self-indulgence and hubris. Americans are hesitant to sacrifice convenience, and so we elect too many leaders who tell us we don’t have to because it’s all a hoax. Don’t worry, be happy, and vote accordingly. For these leaders, mostly Republicans, it’s a win-win. They always win the ignorance vote, and, with it, they always win the financial backing of corporations that are actively engaged in worsening the crisis.

The political misinformation campaign is as strong as ever. Just last week, it was reported that 97 percent of all climate scientists agree that the crisis is real, man-made and happening now. Not surprisingly, the remaining three percent reportedly had less experience and knowledge in the field. Concurrently, according to Gallup, 41 percent of Americans think the climate crisis is exaggerrated. Why? Here’s an example.

Over the weekend, Sarah Palin posted on her Facebook page a photo of her daughter playing in the snow with the following caption: “One last blast of Alaska winter today, hopefully? This is what “Grad Blast” means in Alaska! We’ll move our graduation b-b-q indoors and watch the mini-blizzard from ’round the fireplace. (Global warming my gluteus maximus.)”

As of this writing, 53,372 Likes and 1,995 Shares.

Yes, because there was a dusting of snow in Alaska on Saturday, global warming isn’t real. In fact, the snow in Palin’s back yard might’ve actually been a symptom of climate change. It turns out Anchorage set a new record for the longest snow season ever: 232 days. (A slew of other records were broken as well.) Palin and similarly idiotic deniers don’t understand that a symptom of global warming happens to be the increased severity of all varieties of weather: snow, rain, hurricanes, tornados, heat, cold and so forth. They also don’t understand the notion of climate and global temperature averages versus local weather. Just because it’s cold in New York City in February doesn’t mean global warming isn’t occurring — large sections of the planet might simultaneously be experiencing record high temperatures. Science: complicated stuff for mouth-breathing yokels like Palin.

By the way, I’m only singling out Palin because she was the most recent doofus in the conga-line of ignoramuses to hop in front of the radar. Clearly the numbers show that there continues to be an American pandemic of casual nescience in the face of arguably the most threatening crisis to face humanity since the potential for nuclear war. My ongoing fear is that we’ll simply resign ourselves to the roundelay of worsening natural disasters, and, instead of doing what’s necessary to maintain a hospitable climate for our species, we’ll focus exclusively on thwarting the impact of the climate crisis with more levees, sturdier houses and comprehensive insurance policies. For instance, Chris Christie has done nothing for the environment in New Jersey, but he’s announced the construction of a series of sand dunes to protect against another Hurricane Sandy scenario when, in fact, he and other politicians ought to be focusing on both the disease and the symptoms.

Again, maybe it’s too soon to segue from Oklahoma City to the climate crisis, but as with the gun debate it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate the catastrophes from the politics because the severity of future catastrophes depends entirely upon what we do today, just as the politics and inaction from years ago have contributed to the extreme weather events of 2013 and beyond. We have no choice but to dose a layer of anger with our sympathies in times like these. Through vocal accountability, we might actually make some progress. And make no mistake: there are people — human beings — who are accountable for the climate crisis and its accompanying natural disasters.

How many more monster storms will it take for us to become fed up with it all — to band together and demand a preventative approach rather than merely banding together for triage? If we’re going to break through and solve the climate crisis, we have to defeat our crisis of ignorance. I’m not exactly sure which is more daunting, but we have no choice. We have to achieve this or acquiesce to more of the same — indeed, cataclysms of ever increasing severity. We can take it seriously now before the body counts are incurred, or we can simply weep and pray after the fact as the body counts rise. Even in my most pessimistic hour, I honestly believe we can still do it.

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The Tornado that destroyed an entire suburb in Oklahoma and killed hundreds of people might well have not happened if humans hadn’t been pumping insane amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Or it still might have. We really don’t know for sure.

What we do know is that thousands of people have just experienced unimaginable horror and have been left with an apocalyptic wasteland that used to be their home town. Right now, the country should be focused on the victims in the suburb of Moore, and how they can be helped.

While there is an opportunity to bolster the argument for a strong federal government to help respond to the disaster, and an even better opportunity to promote action on global warming, liberals need to hold off and wait until the panic has calmed before making a point.

It’s not that the arguments are wrong; Disasters often highlight the need for a well functioning, well funded government, and extreme weather events help make the case that rising global temperatures really do have catastrophic effects on all of us.

It is the timing of it that matters.

Republicans will be itching to point fingers at reactionary Democrats (they are already busy smearing Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse for speaking out about it) in order to turn the public off of issues like global warming and funding the federal government. And it works. Republicans, in collusion with oil funded ‘research’, have managed to convince 30% of Americans that man made global warming is a hoax, and even more that government needs to shrink in size. They literally salivate over liberals doing what they do on a daily basis, as they get to look like grownups and swing public opinion in their favor.

So wait, liberals. You’re right about the federal government, and most likely right about the link between the tornado and global warming. Just keep it to yourselves for now if you want your message to actually affect anything.

To donate to the victims of the Oklahoma tornado, go to the Red Cross website here.

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Edge of the ice at Nunavit. (Photo credit: Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA)

By Paul R. Pillar

The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a “Global Governance Report Card” (prepared chiefly by Stewart Patrick) that assesses how the international community has been doing over the past five years in addressing six major global challenges: climate change, finance, nuclear proliferation, armed conflict, public health and terrorism.

Any evaluation this ambitious offers selections and judgments that can and will be shot at, but the report card (backed up by more detailed discussions in each subject area, including which states and organizations have been doing well or poorly) offers useful food for thought.

Edge of the ice at Nunavit. (Photo credit: Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA)

One of the main impressions is that the grades the global community has earned are unimpressive. They range from a B on finance and terrorism to a D on climate change, with the average somewhere around a C+. The world community is coasting through its curriculum. The dean’s list does not appear to be in sight.

Another immediate impression is the relative performance in the different subject areas, especially that D for climate change. The graders probably have this about right. The pattern of performance reflects more attention to short-term attention-grabbers and less to long-term disasters in the making. Severe recessions and terrorist attacks command immediate attention; slow destruction of the planet does not.

For each of the six areas the United States gets its own separate grade for its part in the global performance. The U.S. grades vary in tandem with the world grades but are always a notch or two higher—ranging from a B+ for finance and terrorism to a C- for climate change. Does this reflect a U.S.-centric bias? Perhaps.

It also raises questions about the size of roles and responsibilities for different actors. The United States gets credit for doing more than most others about most of these problems, but some would argue (while others would not) that the United States, given its size and power, should be expected to do more.

One can also raise issues of consistency in the evaluations. On global finance Germany is dinged as a “laggard” for initially pushing for austerity measures that “undermined market confidence and intensified economic challenges” elsewhere in Europe. But the discussion of the United States gives no hint of a parallel macroeconomic issue in America, including an issue of persistent unemployment.

The only criticism made of the United States in this section (other than points about its relations with the IMF and World Bank) is about Congressional inaction on the deficit that “subjected the U.S. Treasury bond market to unnecessary risk” — even though that market has shown no sign of anxiety and interest rates remain historically low.

Obviously different people can bring different values to such questions and to this exercise as a whole. Even when values are not involved, to say whether the world community has left a given situation in good or in poor shape often does not point to any one policy lesson.

In the armed conflict category, for example, the report card laments how messy Iraq has been since the U.S. withdrawal and how messy Afghanistan looks to be as the United States is drawing down there. Should the main lesson be that the United States should not have attempted any nation-building in those countries (and in Iraq, never have gone in at all), or that it has not done enough in the way of nation-building? One can find people on both sides of such questions.

As broad as the six subject areas are, in a sense they are not broad enough. Under terrorism, for example, high marks are given for attention to terrorist finance and terrorism with unconventional weapons — and yes, there certainly has been plenty of attention to those topics — but the world community is rated as doing a “poor” job of “fighting terrorism while protecting human rights.”

Some might go farther and argue that protection of human rights deserves to be a major category in its own right. The main lesson here is that interactions and trade-offs abound.

When the world community has messed something up it often has been a matter of focusing too narrowly on some single objective — such as stopping terrorism, overthrowing a dictator, or reducing a deficit — with insufficient attention to all the other interests and costs involved.

Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Many of us are enjoying our post-election schadenfreude, observing as the Republican Party increasingly marginalizes itself, demographically and politically, and scrambles to cut a narrowing path to the White House while also attempting to shove the tea party demon back into its cage.

Yet at the same time, we’re hearing more and more about all varieties of insanity at the state and local level where the party has been cultivating its power base for decades. Strategically, it’s a fantastic back-door to exploit.

While Washington is the primary focus of our national attention, and the president’s re-election victory offers the facade of Democratic dominance, Republicans in many states have been able to operate mostly unopposed.

I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer here, but let’s do the list. Off the top of my head we’ve observed the passage or near-passage of voter ID laws, attacks on unions, sweeping legislation reversing reproductive rights, anti-abortion ultrasound laws, personhood amendments, gerrymandering and electoral vote tampering. They’ve blocked Medicaid expansion while refusing to implement the Obamacare health insurance exchanges. They’ve passed school voucher programs that privatize the public education system and they’ve slashed and burned social programs while protecting tax cuts for the rich. And the Republicans are doing a fine job of blocking new gun control legislation. Most of these measures have been successfully pushed through various state capitals by dominant Republican legislatures and governors. And on top of everything else, they’re pushing the antiquated process of nullification. As I wrote this week, nullification originated with the pro-slavery movement and, in today’s context, would theoretically block the federal government from overruling any of the above.

Suddenly, the Republican Party doesn’t seem as feckless and geriatric, eh? Before Democrats laugh and point at the GOP clown car, they ought to keep a very serious eye on the states because the Republicans are kicking their collective asses.

In Oklahoma yesterday, Republican legislators advanced a bill, HB 1674, through the state Common Education committee. If passed, the law would make it illegal for a teacher — a public school teacher — from giving a student a poor grade for answering questions about science and evolution with unprovable, untestable biblical mythology. In other words, if a teacher asks a test question about the lives of prehistoric humans, a student could suggest that cave men or maybe even Jesus himself used to ride on the backs on dinosaurs and science teachers would be unable to mark the answer as incorrect. A student could invoke the Great Flood and the talking snake in the Garden of Eden in a discussion about the provable science of evolution and not be corrected for it.

Additionally, the law would make it illegal for a teacher to grade a student poorly for debunking the climate crisis — global warming. The student could write, for example, that it’s snowing in the Northeast in February and therefore the global climate can’t be growing warmer and unstable.

In Kansas last week, Republican lawmakers introduced HB2306, which would force teachers to present evidence that debunks the climate crisis while also presenting alternate views on whether and why the climate is changing. The bill commands that public school educators “provide information to students of scientific evidence which both supports and counters a scientific theory or hypothesis.” Of course the twisted logic of this bill would allow a crackpot teacher to instruct his or her students on the existence of Bigfoot and the notion that dead people can become ghosts and subsequently haunt houses. In science class. As I’m sure you can deduce, without the scientific method and the results it generates as the basis upon which science class is taught, anything goes. And “anything goes” in science class is phenomenally dangerous.

Meanwhile, back in Missouri, another law, HB 291, the “Missouri Standard Science Act,” was introduced by Rep. Rick Brattin. The law would force teachers to give equal science class time to intelligent design, the idea of “destiny” and whatever other ridiculous theories about human origins are floating around out there. According to Mother Jones, the bill redefines important scientific precepts:

For example, a “hypothesis” is redefined as something that reflects a “minority of scientific opinion and is “philosophically unpopular.” A scientific theory is “an inferred explanation…whose components are data, logic and faith-based philosophy.” And “destiny” is not something that $5 fortune tellers believe in; Instead, it’s “the events and processes that define the future of the universe, galaxies, stars, our solar system, earth, plant life, animal life, and the human race.”

To anyone with even a modest respect for science, this law ought to be terrifying. Further terrifying is what Rep. Brattin said about the bill, “I’m a science enthusiast…I’m a huge science buff. This [bill] is about testable data in today’s world.” Um. Yeah. He’s not. He’s a far-right fundamentalist zealot who’s cleverly disguised himself as a science “buff.” And there’s nothing resembling testable data when it comes to intelligent design, just a lot of hocus-pocus conjecture based on wishful thinking. Besides, intelligent design isn’t an end in and of itself, it’s clearly a stepping stone to teaching creationism in science class.

The saying goes, All politics is state and local politics. And the Republican Party is remarkably dominent. Their efforts are going a long way towards the further Balkanization of science and our broader culture, not to mention civil and voting rights. So maybe it’s an appropriate time for Democrats to put down the schadenfreude and get to work.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From The Huffington Post:

Even more astonishing is the imbalance between all-time records. According to data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, there were 356 all-time high temperature records set or tied in 2012, compared to four all-time low temperature records. All of the all-time record lows occurred in Hawaii.

As the climate has warmed during the past several decades, there has been a growing imbalance between record daily high temperatures in the contiguous U.S. and record daily lows. A study published in 2009 found that rather than a 1-to-1 ratio, as would be expected if the climate were not warming, the ratio has been closer to 2-to-1 in favor of warm temperature records during the past decade (2000-2009). This finding cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone, the study found, and is instead consistent with global warming.

Driven largely by the warm temperatures and the massive drought, one measure of extreme weather conditions, known as the Climate Extremes Index, shows that it was the second-most extreme year on record, second only to 1998. Studies show that in response to global warming, some extreme events, such as heat waves, are already becoming more likely to occur and more intense.

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A tornado forming over Oklahoma. (Photo credit: U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

By Winslow Myers:

Because the United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet, Americans have the luxury of being proactive in ensuring their future security. But the path to that security looks very different from the way it did even a few years ago.

A primary example of this transformed security context is the realization that there is only one atmosphere surrounding the earth. Unless all nations make a concerted effort to convert to sources of clean energy, global mean temperatures will continue to rise and cause undesirable extremes of weather.

Strategic competition between superpowers like Russia, China and the U.S. becomes irrelevant to the larger crisis of fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions from all countries. The violence of storms in one country may be intensified by the environmental policies of another country, and vice-versa.

Fossil fuel corporations, more powerful than many national governments, must be pressured from taking more oil or coal out of the ground even though they have the technical means and the capital to do so. While entrenched interests are resistant to such painful change, countries like Germany are providing a model of how it can be done, having relinquished nuclear power and moved successfully toward hybridized alternatives like solar, wind, tidal, and low-head hydro power—indeed, a far more secure mix than a huge vulnerable nuclear reactor or coal-fired, smoke-belching plant.

Where would the capital come from for an American conversion away from fossil fuels? How about our profligate and useless nuclear weapons renewal program? Nuclear weapons take their place as one more environmental challenge.

Scientists have computer-modeled the possibility that even a small nuclear war using only a fraction of the weapons available would loft enough soot into the atmosphere to cause a worldwide shutdown of agriculture for a decade. This accelerated climate event would be as much a death sentence for the planet as all-out nuclear war between two superpowers.

Established U.S. policy assumes that deterrence needs to be maintained against the Russian nuclear arsenal — even though the Cold War has been over for a generation. Deterrence theory also breaks down against a nuclear attack by terrorist extremists, who could simply bring a device into a country by stealth. A potent combination of obsolete deterrence strategy, the profitability of new submarines, missiles, and drones, and the assumption that no other nation is in a position to police the world, rationalizes the momentum of the American weapons industry.

The assumption that all U.S. ordnance will be perpetually fail-safe is the ultimate folly. We are rushing headlong toward a cliff that makes a molehill of the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

Conditions on the macro level are replicated at smaller scales. The massacre of children in Newtown has renewed discussion about which societal models most effectively protect the innocent. Some have suggested that safety lies in more rather than fewer weapons — a deterrence model similar to that which has been vainly pursued on the international level.

Arming everyone to the teeth, whether individuals or nations, is a devil’s bargain yielding only greater and greater insecurity, especially given the possibility of accident or misinterpretation. It has now been a half-century since we learned where this model inevitably leads. During the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union came within a hair’s breadth of total global annihilation.

Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan saw the light when they met in Reykjavik in 1986 and considered the total elimination of nuclear arsenals on both sides. The momentum of global arms manufacture rushes us past such milestones of visionary common sense into a future that, unless we risk citizen-supported change, looks increasingly foreboding.

Even if the U.S. and Russia could agree to disarm to their last warhead, the planet needs to address the tensions between newer members of the nuclear club like India and Pakistan, who have yet to learn the inescapable lesson of the Cuban missile crisis. Perhaps the quickest way for them to learn it is by our setting an example.

The only force sufficient to counter this momentum is citizen awareness and action, building relationships across illusory divides with people in other nations on the basis of shared security concerns. The divides are illusory because all of us on the planet face the same challenges together. This reality is powerful enough to overcome the fear and enemy-imaging that has restrained global peace building in the past.

Americans, who are blessed with so much in spite of our present economic woes, shouldn’t find it so hard to imagine how deeply grateful people in places like Iran would feel if we built down our nuclear weapons programs, setting aside the resulting peace dividend toward a massive conversion to sustainable energy sources and meeting worldwide needs for medicine, clean water, nourishing food, and shelter.

As such initiatives came to be appreciated, terrorism would inevitably die a natural death. The scarcity of resources that is expected to be the cause of future wars would be addressed preemptively. Given the greater risks of continuing on our present course, this fundamental change of direction is worth the gamble. If you agree, write your representative.

Winslow Myers leads seminars on the challenges of personal and global change, is the author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide, serves on the Advisory Board of the War Preventive Initiative, is a member of the Rotarian Action Group for Peace, and writes for PeaceVoice.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Today I’m going to teach you how you can get a free Prius, and you barely have to do anything to get it.

Until recently, I owned a Prius and I can tell you that’s it’s easily the finest car I’ve ever driven. As traveling goes, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as driving 500 miles, roughly 20 percent of the distance from New York to Los Angeles, on a single 11-gallon tank of gas, while also knowing that you’ve generated nearly zero emissions. Plus, the LED screen on the dash that displays your real time miles-per-gallon via two different visual representations almost becomes like a video game that intuitively re-teaches you how to drive, by letting you know when you should ease up on the gas pedal thus using more of the electric motor and less of the gas engine (the Prius doesn’t need to be plugged in — it charges its battery using the gas engine and the kinetic energy from braking and coasting of the car).

It’s a fantastic vehicle, and I wish I could report that the Great Recession didn’t hammer my personal finances forcing me to give up my Prius and to settle for a higher emissions, less fuel efficient car. But it did. Thanks, Great Recession.

But I figured out a solution for achieving the environmental benefits of the Prius without actually owning one. Ready?

Eat less beef.

By reducing your meat consumption by 20 percent, you’ll achieve the same positive impact on climate crisis as you would by switching from a Camry-sized car to a Prius, and you don’t have to cover the monthly payments, the insurance premiums or the minimal cost of fuel (you still have to buy gas for a Prius). It turns out that the simple act of going meatless once out of every five meals is roughly the carbon footprint equivalent of trading in a four-door sedan for a Prius, based on the meat consumption of an average American. It reduces your carbon footprint by half-a-ton of carbon per year. Again, this isn’t to say you can drive a massive Hummer or other gas guzzler and make up for the Godzilla-sized footprint by eating less meat; the calculations are based on switching from an average sedan-sized car to a Prius.

Some additional items of note about American meat production:

-The UN reports that meat production is responsible for 20 percent of greenhouse gasses, more than is produced by cars, trucks and airplanes.

-America is 5 percent of the population, but we consume 15 percent of the world’s total meat products. Around 10 billion heads of livestock annually.

-The production of just 2.2 lbs of beef is the environmental equivalent of driving a European-style car for 155 miles. Four McDonald’s Quarter Pounders.

-We’re eating 50 lbs more beef now than we did 50 years ago, and twice the USDA recommended daily allowance of beef.

Needless to say, we’re eating too much meat.

Now, while I’m an animal rights supporter, I’m not going to guilt you into going vegetarian or vegan. If you love beef and you don’t mind where it comes from and you simply can’t live without it, have at it. All I’m suggesting here is a path towards achieving a significant reduction in our carbon footprint by going vegetarian for one out of every fifth meat meal. It’s actually much easier than buying a new Prius, and it’s less expensive that buying beef. And if you can get your hands on locally raised beef, even better.

So there’s your Prius. And you can still shove burgers and steaks into your face if you want to. Win win.

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By Bob Cesca:

Credit where credit is due, Matt Yglesias coined the phrase “climate cliff” via Twitter the other day in reference to the now inevitable 2°C global temperature increase. I liked it so much I thought I’d borrow it for a while.

Why a cliff? On the other side of this 2°C threshold, designated by the EU in 1996 and reinforced this month at the climate conference in Doha, Qatar, are unspeakably disastrous consequences. The 2°C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) breaking point indicates the total temperature increase from pre-industrial records. Since then, however, greenhouse gasses have already generated a 0.8°C hike. In other words, we’re nearly halfway there.

Worse yet, the CO2 we’re emitting right now will create another 0.7°C of additional inevitable warming. So we’re really just 0.5°C away from falling over the cliff. As recently as two years ago, scientists placed the cliff at the year 2100, but since then, it’s become clear that we’ll hit the cliff much sooner, by around 2052.

It gets worse. We might actually hit 4°C by 2100 — more than double the projections from just two years ago. And global C02 emissions continue to grow. Industrialized nations set a new record in 2011 with a 3.1 percent increase in CO2 emissions, and another 2.8 percent increase for 2012. Yay us!

In reality, therefore, we’re looking at not one but two climate cliffs. The 2°C cliff and the increasingly likely 4°C cliff, with the accompanying climatological impact growing rapidly more calamitous as each milestone nears. In that regard, the word “cliff” doesn’t quite suffice, implying that the descent over the cliff will precipitate all of the chaos when, in fact, the chaos will worsen as we near the cliff, with ongoing deterioration after that. But if we can somehow prevent one of the cliffs from happening, we will have ameliorated the worsening — and we’ll have to be satisfied with a “not as awful as it could’ve been but still awful” achievement.

In order to understand what will happen at or in the vicinity of the cliffs, it’s important to evaluate the crisis as it stands right now. Record droughts, wildfires, storm events, floods and brain-melting heatwaves appear to be the new normal — with otherwise ordinary weather scenarios exacerbated by rising CO2 emissions and the parallel acceleration of global warming. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ocean levels are rising 60 faster than earlier estimates. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the 12 month interval from July 2011 through July 2012 was the hottest on record in the United States, and July 2012 was the hottest month ever, beating out the hottest month of the Dust Bowl era. Also during July, the Greenland ice sheet thawed by 97 percent — up from around 40 percent.

And what’s likely to happen at around the time we hit the first climate cliff of 2°C?

At 2°C, the average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will be around 450 parts per million (ppm). At that point, a significant portion of the Earth’s surface ice will have melted. Imagine for a moment the current weather “weirding” — accompanied by droughts and floods and massive destruction — and then imagine what’ll happen when the global temperature increase is twice as high as it is today.

At 4°C, and 560 ppm of atmospheric CO2, the world will look remarkably different. In a report commissioned by the World Bank, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact determined that this particular cliff would bring:

…increasing risks for food production, potentially leading to higher malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer, and wet regions wetter; unprecedented heatwaves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased frequency of high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems. [...] And, most important, a world that is 4C warmer is so different from the current one that it comes with high uncertainty and new risks that threaten our ability to anticipate and plan for future needs.

Yeah.

By this point, flooding similar to or worse than Hurricane Sandy will hit Manhattan every several years as sea levels grow by more than three feet. Huge sections of farmland in poor nations like Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam, and certain African nations would be under water. The World Bank noted that the last Ice Age was around 4°C cooler, begging the question: what the hell will happen when temperatures move 4°C warmer?

The first cliff, 2°C, appears to be inevitable unless we take drastic action right away. China and India, in particular, absolutely must catch up with the rest of the world. Even the United States has made better efforts to curb CO2 emissions recently, but it doesn’t appear to be enough. The 4°C cliff appears to be way off in the distant future, just beyond our foreseeable lifetimes according to current estimates, but what will the world look like at 3.5°C or 3.2°C? Horrible in comparison with the effects of today’s climate crisis.

To be perfectly honest about my lack of optimism on the climate crisis, I don’t really see how we can avoid this, especially given that we’re literally in it right now. Though I constantly grapple with how to write about it without making the crisis seem totally futile and, essentially, a foregone conclusion that can’t be stopped. There is, in fact, hope. I’m just having a tough time seeing it right now.

The biggest mistake we can make right now, however, it to give up, either by accepting the crisis or by procrastinating — by viewing it as a distant potential event, like the possibility of getting cancer from second hand smoke… some day. The cancer is here and now. And the leaders who should’ve taken serious action a decade ago have obviously failed, while the current roster of leaders, including President Obama, are unable to take the radical steps required to prevent the cliff (steps, by the way, that could create an Industrial-Revolution-level economic boom). Instead of tackling the root cause of the problem, I fear that we’ll focus on mitigating the symptoms: moving away from the coasts, adding sea walls, developing GMOs that are more resistant to drought conditions and so forth. Of course these steps will probably be taken anyway, but the bulk of our efforts have to be laser focused on keeping CO2 levels at or below today’s 397 ppm.

But given how the American press continues to offer air time and column-inches to nonsensical climate crisis deniers/trolls; given how the conservative entertainment complex continues to spread egregious misinformation and ignorance; and given how unimportant the issue is to voters (it didn’t even break 1 percent support in 2012 exit polling of the most important issues to voters), it’s difficult to see a path to a real solution.

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Discussing the existence of God and quoting the bible is generally a harmless thing to do (if it isn’t rammed down children’s throats and taught as absolute fact), but using religious scripture to dismiss hard scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels is directly responsible for global warming is a different thing all together.

According to Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance, and Bryan Fischer of “Focal Point”, not only is global warming a complete hoax, but not using fossil fuels is “An insult to God”. Both men agree that God has buried fossil fuels, or “treasures” as Fischer describes them, because he “loves to see us find them”. Despite the fact that fossil fuels are  rapidly depleting, non-renewable, and environmentally catastrophic when burned for energy, because Beisner and Fischer can use them to cheaply heat their barbeques, it must be ordained by God. This nonsense actually passes for serious intellectual debate for millions of Americans, and it should frighten the life out of everyone else.

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