Rising Global Temperatures Quotes

Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.

The United States Department of Defense makes its position clear in a policy statement published in 2014. The document begins: Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe. In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today—from infectious disease to terrorism. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts.

Global warming, in contrast, will probably have different impacts on different nations. Some countries, most notably Russia, might actually benefit from it. Because Russia has relatively few coastline assets, it is far less worried than China or Kiribati about rising sea levels. And whereas higher temperatures are likely to turn Chad into a desert, they might simultaneously turn Siberia into the breadbasket of the world. Moreover, as the ice melts in the far north, the Russian-dominated Arctic sea lanes might become the artery of global commerce, and Kamchatka might replace Singapore as the crossroad of the world.

Unseasonably warm. It’s because the Earth is dying, of course. Rising global average temperatures are associated with widespread fluctuations in weather patterns, and that’s why we’re still wearing lightweight jackets, even though it’s late November in D.C. and Christmas trees have been popping up for weeks now.

Imagine that after reaching an atmospheric concentration of 450 ppm sometime in the next decade, we immediately stop all carbon dioxide emissions. By the year 3000, neither atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide nor global mean surface temperature would have returned to their pre-industrial baselines, and sea levels would still be rising.

A simple calculation shows that the temperature in the arctic regions would rise about eight to nine degrees Celsius, if the carbonic acid increased to two and a half or three times its present value.

A grotesque thought struck Benji: Humankind was a disease. The earth was the body. Climate change was the fever. And in that fever, in that rising of global temperature, the earth was able to release new defenses. White Mask was not here to kill the world. It was here to kill the people—the fungus would serve as a vicious defense mechanism to eradicate the infection of humanity. This epidemic represented antibodies to restore balance to the body. Kill the parasite and save the host.

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.

It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth’s tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confronted with a fluctuating and unpredictable climate, ‘the last thing you’d want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it’. It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might actually be induced by a rise in temperatures. The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates and increase cloud cover, leading in the higher latitudes to more persistent accumulations of snow. In fact, global warming could plausibly, if paradoxically, lead to powerful localized cooling in North America and northern Europe.

SINCE the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little over four hundred parts per million—is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. Quite probably it is higher than at any point in the last several million years. If current trends continue, CO2 concentrations will top five hundred parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, and this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. But this is only half the story.

It is not uncommon for people to prefer to believe the bullshit that global warming is a hoax than to accept the facts that icebergs are melting, floods and droughts are increasing, the Amazon rain forest is disappearing, and dangerous methane gases are bubbling up from the ocean floor all because global temperatures are rising.

So ecological duress can increase or decrease aggression. This raises the key issue of what global warming will do to our best and worst behaviors. There will definitely be some upsides. Some regions will have longer growing seasons, increasing the food supply and reducing tensions. Some people will eschew conflict, being preoccupied with saving their homes from the encroaching ocean or growing pineapples in the Arctic. But amid squabbling about the details in predictive models, the consensus is that global warming won’t do good things to global conflict. For starters, warmer temperatures rile people up—in cities during the summers, for every three degree increase in temperature, there was a 4 percent increase in interpersonal violence and 14 percent in group violence. But global warming’s bad news is more global—desertification, loss of arable land due to rising seas, more droughts. One influential meta-analysis projected 16 percent and 50 percent increases in interpersonal and group violence, respectively, in some regions by 2050.

The retreat of the Arctic sea ice, the warming of the oceans, the rapid shrinking of the glaciers, the redistribution of species, the thawing of the permafrost—these are all new phenomena. It is only in the last five or ten years that global warming has finally emerged from the background “noise” of climate variability. And even so, the changes that can be seen lag behind the changes that have been set in motion. The warming that has been observed so far is probably only about half the amount required to bring the planet back into energy balance. This means that even if carbon dioxide were to remain stable at today’s levels, temperatures would still continue to rise, glaciers to melt, and weather patterns to change for decades to come.

It’s . . . nice outside today.” It’s not that it isn’t. It is, in fact, really nice. Unseasonably warm. It’s because the Earth is dying, of course. Rising global average temperatures are associated with widespread fluctuations in weather patterns, and that’s why we’re still wearing lightweight jackets, even though it’s late November in D.C. and Christmas trees have been popping up for weeks now.

It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might actually be induced by a rise in temperatures. The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates and increase cloud cover, leading in the higher latitudes to more persistent accumulations of snow. In fact, global warming could plausibly, if paradoxically, lead to powerful localized cooling in North America and northern Europe. Climate is the product

If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.

This is why one of every five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion. Most of the world’s fish stocks are in crisis from overfishing. By 2050, some studies predict, there will be more plastic waste in the sea than fish, measured in weight. The oceans are despoiled and depleted because most governments have neither the inclination nor the resources to protect them. It is hard enough to get the public’s attention about the dangers of global warming, even as the effects of it become clear, including hotter temperatures, rising seas, and more severe storms. But dwindling fish stocks? They hardly register.

We are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, beyond which even a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to reverse the trend and avoid a worldwide tragedy. For example, as global warming melts the polar ice sheets, less sunlight is reflected back from planet Earth to outer space. This means that the planet absorbs more heat, temperatures rise even higher and the ice melts even faster. Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an irresistible momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil and gas. Hence it is not enough that we recognise the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do something about it now. (page 77)

Temperatures, petrol prices, the price of the dollar: the golden triangle of our summer. These are facts beyond our control and all we hope now is to see them all rising indefinitely. Sometimes the figures are mixed up in a prophetic confusion, as in 1980 in the US deserts. There, the price per gallon: 51.18, 51.20, 51 .25, varied from one place to another as an exact reflection of the temperature graphs: 100, 110 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit. With the question of confidence always lurking just beneath the surface: what price would you accept petrol rising to? What point do you think the dollar could go up to (with the implication: before causing a crash in world economies)? What record level can the heat reach (before causing a volatilization of energy and the beginnings of a worldwide insomnia)? Our artificial destiny is written in these asymptotic curves.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I’m surprised because the transcript doesn’t register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster,

But that’s where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it’s pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we’ve had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it’s been going on for a while now. “Also, it turns out that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.

The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action. But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use we are lowering the surface temperature of our planet. Might this cooling increase the size of the polar ice cap, which, because it is bright, will reflect still more sunlight from the Earth, further cooling the planet, driving a runaway albedo* effect? Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.

The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.

Suppose we humans are, as a species, exhibiting disease behavior: we’re multiplying with no regard for limits, consuming natural resources as if there will be no future generations, and producing waste products that are distressing the planet upon which our very survival depends. There are two factors which we, as a species, are not taking into consideration. First is the survival tactic of pathogens, which requires additional hosts to infect. We do not have the luxury of that option, at least not yet. If we are successful at continuing our dangerous behavior, then we will also succeed in marching straight toward our own demise. In the process, we can also drag many other species down with us, a dreadful syndrome that is already underway. This is evident by the threat of extinction that hangs, like the sword of Damocles, over an alarming number of the Earth’s species. There is a second consideration: infected host organisms fight back. As humans become an increasing menace, can the Earth try to defend itself? When a disease organism infects a human, the human body elevates its own temperature in order to defend itself. This rise in temperature not only inhibits the growth of the infecting pathogen, but also greatly enhances the disease fighting capability within the body. Global warming may be the Earth’s way of inducing a global “fever” as a reaction to human pollution of the atmosphere and human over-consumption of fossil fuels.

One response to the prospect of climate change is to deny that it is occurring or that human activity is the cause. It's completely appropriate of course to challenge the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change on scientific grounds, particularly given the extreme measures it calls for if it is true. The great virtue of science is that a true hypothesis will in the long run withstand attempts to falsify it. Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were only measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising, but only because the sun is getting hotter, have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced. A recent survey found that exactly 4 out of 69,406 authors of peer reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. And that the peer reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against the hypothesis. Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are harming the planet. In doing so, they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. As someone who considers himself something of a watchdog for politically correct dogma in academia, I can state that this is nonsense. Physical scientists have no such agenda and the evidence speaks for itself. And it's precisely because of challenges like this that scholars in all fields have a duty to secure the credibility of the academy by not enforcing political orthodoxies.

This terrifying experiment has already been set in motion. Unlike nuclear war—which is a future potential—climate change is a present reality. There is a scientific consensus that human activities, in particular the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, are causing the earth’s climate to change at a frightening rate.7 Nobody knows exactly how much carbon dioxide we can continue to pump into the atmosphere without triggering an irreversible cataclysm. But our best scientific estimates indicate that unless we dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gases in the next twenty years, average global temperatures will increase by more than 3.6ºF, resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons.8 These changes in turn will disrupt agricultural production, inundate cities, make much of the world uninhabitable, and send hundreds of millions of refugees in search of new homes.9 Moreover, we are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, beyond which even a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to reverse the trend and avoid a worldwide tragedy. For example, as global warming melts the polar ice sheets, less sunlight is reflected back from planet Earth to outer space. This means that the planet absorbs more heat, temperatures rise even higher, and the ice melts even faster. Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an unstoppable momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil, and gas. Therefore it is not enough that we recognize the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do something about it now. Unfortunately, as of 2018, instead of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global emission rate is still increasing. Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels. We need to enter rehab today. Not next year or next month, but today. “Hello, I am Homo sapiens, and I am a fossil-fuel addict.

Get used to it. The weather may feel like science fiction, but the science underlying it is very real and mundane. It takes only a small increase in global average temperatures to have a big effect on weather, because what drives the winds and their circulation patterns on the surface of the earth are differences in temperature. So when you start to change the average surface temperature of the earth, you change the wind patterns—and then before you know it, you change the monsoons. When the earth gets warmer, you also change rates of evaporation—which is a key reason we will get more intense rainstorms in some places and hotter dry spells and longer droughts in others. How can we have both wetter and drier extremes at the same time? As we get rising global average temperatures and the earth gets warmer, it will trigger more evaporation from the soil. So regions that are already naturally dry will tend to get drier. At the same time, higher rates of evaporation, because of global warming, will put more water vapor into the atmosphere, and so areas that are either near large bodies of water or in places where atmospheric dynamics already favor higher rates of precipitation will tend to get wetter. We know one thing about the hydrologic cycle: What moisture goes up must come down, and where more moisture goes up, more will come down. Total global precipitation will probably increase, and the amount that will come down in any one storm is expected to increase as well—which will increase flooding and gully washers. That’s why this rather gentle term “global warming” doesn’t capture the disruptive potential of what lies ahead. “The popular term ‘global warming’ is a misnomer,” says John Holdren. “It implies something uniform, gradual, mainly about temperature, and quite possibly benign. What is happening to global climate is none of those. It is uneven geographically. It is rapid compared to ordinary historic rates of climatic change, as well as rapid compared to the adjustment times of ecosystems and human society. It is affecting a wide array of critically important climatic phenomena besides temperature, including precipitation, humidity, soil moisture, atmospheric circulation patterns, storms, snow and ice cover, and ocean currents and upwellings. And its effects on human well-being are and undoubtedly will remain far more negative than positive. A more accurate, albeit more cumbersome, label than ‘global warming’ is ‘global climatic disruption.’ 

You’re probably wondering what happened before you got here. An awful lot of stuff, actually. Once we evolved into humans, things got pretty interesting. We figured out how to grow food and domesticate animals so we didn’t have to spend all of our time hunting. Our tribes got much bigger, and we spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus. Then, after fighting a bunch of wars with each other over land, resources, and our made-up gods, we eventually got all of our tribes organized into a ‘global civilization.’ But, honestly, it wasn’t all that organized, or civilized, and we continued to fight a lot of wars with each other. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology. For a bunch of hairless apes, we’ve actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things. Computers. Medicine. Lasers. Microwave ovens. Artificial hearts. Atomic bombs. We even sent a few guys to the moon and brought them back. We also created a global communications network that lets us all talk to each other, all around the world, all the time. Pretty impressive, right? “But that’s where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it’s pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we’ve had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it’s been going on for a while now. “Also, it turns out that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left. “Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in ‘decline.’ Some people even say it’s ‘collapsing.’ “You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.

we do not know the physics of climate system responses to warming well enough to blame most of the warming on human activities. Human causation is simply assumed. The models are designed with the assumption that the climate system was in natural balance before the Industrial Revolution, despite historical evidence to the contrary. They only produce human-caused climate change because that is the way they are designed. This is in spite of abundant evidence of past warm episodes, such as 1,000- to 2,000-year-old tree stumps being uncovered by receding glaciers; temperature proxy evidence for the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods covering that same time frame; and Arctic sea ice proxy evidence for a natural decrease in sea ice starting well before humans could be blamed. Natural warming since the Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago is simply ignored in the design of climate models, since we do not know what caused it. Simply put, the computerized climate models support human causation of climate change because that’s what they assume from the outset. They are an example of circular reasoning. There is little to no evidence of long-term increases in heat waves, droughts, or floods. Wildfire activity has, if anything, decreased, even though poor land management practices are now making some areas more vulnerable to wildfires even without climate change. Contrary to popular perception and new reports, there is little to no evidence of increased storminess resulting from climate change. This includes tornadoes and hurricanes. Long-term increases in monetary storm damages have indeed occurred, but are due to increasing development, not worsening weather. Sea level has been rising naturally since at least the mid-1800s, well before humans could be blamed. Land subsidence in some areas (e.g. Norfolk, Miami, Galveston-Houston, New Orleans) would result in increasing flooding problems even without any sea-level rise, let alone human-induced sea-level rise causing thermal expansion of the oceans. Some evidence for recent acceleration of sea-level rise might support human causation, but the magnitude of the human component since 1950 has been only 1 inch every 30 years. Ocean acidification is now looking like a non-problem, as the evidence builds that sea life prefers somewhat more CO2, just as vegetation on land does. Given that CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, yet had been at dangerously low levels for thousands of years, the scientific community needs to stop accepting the premise that more CO2 in the atmosphere is necessarily a bad thing. Global greening has been observed by satellites over the last few decades, which is during the period of most rapid rises in atmospheric CO2. The benefits of increasing CO2 to agriculture have been calculated to be in the trillions of dollars. Crop yields continue to break records around the world, due to a combination of human ingenuity and the direct effects of CO2 on plant growth and water use efficiency. Much of this evidence is not known by our citizens, who are largely misinformed by a news media that favors alarmist stories. The scientific community is, in general, biased toward alarmism in order to maintain careers and support desired governmental energy policies. Only when the public becomes informed based upon evidence from both sides of the debate can we expect to make rational policy decisions. I hope my brief treatment of these subjects provides a step in that direction. THE END

As the discoverer and principal excavator of Murray Springs, [...] Haynes deserves credit for drawing attention to a very curious aspect of the site--a distinct dark layer of soil draped 'like a shrink-wrap,' as Allen West puts it, over the top of the Clovis remains and of the extinct megafauna--including Eloise. Haynes has identified this 'black mat' (his term) not only at Murray Springs but at dozens of other sites across North America, and was the first to acknowledge its clear and obvious association with the Late Pleistocene Extinction Event. he speaks of the 'remarkable circumstances' surrounding the event, the abrupt die-off on a continental scale of all large mammals 'immediately before deposition of the ... black mat,' and the total absence thereafter of 'mammoth, mastodon, horse, camel, dire wold, American lion, tapir and other [megafauna], as well as Clovis people.' Haynes notes also that 'The basal black mat contact marks a major climate change from the warm dry climate of the terminal Allerod to the glacially cold Younger Dryas.' From roughly 18,000 years ago, and for several thousand years thereafter, global temperatures had been slowly but steadily rising and the ice sheets melting. Our ancestors would have had reason to hope that earth's long winter was at last coming to an end and that a new era of congenial climate beckoned. This process of warming became particularly pronounced after about 14,500 years ago. Then suddenly, around 12,800 years ago, the direction of climate change reversed and the world turned dramatically, instantly cold--as cold as it had been at the peak of the Ice Age many thousands of years earlier. This deep freeze--the mysterious epoch now known as the Younger Dryas--lasted for approximately 1,200 years until 11,600 years ago, at which point the climate flipped again, global temperatures shot up rapidly, the remnant ice sheets melted and collapsed into the oceans, and the world became as warm as it is today.

Why have global temperatures not risen in the best part of two decades while CO2 levels have kept on rising? •    

What is the Paris Climate Agreement? 195 countries signed a pledge to keep global temperature rise below 2°C (3.6°F), and, if possible, below 1.5°C (2.7°F). All countries agree to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero as soon as possible in the second half of the century. The U.S. pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. India aims to install 175 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2022. China will peak its CO2 emissions by 2030. Developed countries will provide $100 billion in climate finance by 2020. Countries should raise the ambition of their initial commitments over time to make sure we meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement entered into force on November 4, 2016.

The catastrophic event of 12,000 years ago, having melted much of the planet's ice and causing a global sea rise of some 350 feet, could have been so intense as to have raised global temperatures by six degrees Celsius [...]. The ending of the last ice age was not a gradual event, as most people would assume, but fast and intense.

What are the results of a polluted planet Earth? Historic severe storms resulting in record breaking flooding, rising sea levels with ocean water so hot it is killing off the life within it, the hottest surface temperatures ever recorded, forests fires so large they pollute for thousands of miles, extreme seasons that cause landslides, dams that are rapidly going empty, and the rise of autism and gender issues followed by a global pandemic are all good examples of a polluted planet Earth.

The whole world is affected by the earth’s rising temperature. We’re raising it further.

The impact of the current food system is not sustainable for the next few decades – let alone the next few millennia. The environmental cost is so immense that, even if we stopped all fossil-fuel emissions, emissions from the global food system alone will take us well beyond the fatal 1.5°C rise in temperature by 2100.12 And, while there will always be an environmental impact from farming and processing food for 8 billion people, UPF is a particular driver of carbon emissions and environmental destruction.

Unfortunately, one of the planet’s most biodiverse and important ecosystems will not survive two degrees intact. The science on corals and global warming has got steadily more alarming over recent years, in tandem with the accelerated destruction of reefs by rapidly rising temperatures around the world’s tropical coastlines, as has already been described. In 2018 the IPCC had to admit that ‘tropical corals may be even more vulnerable to climate change than indicated in assessments made in 2014.’ Marine biologists watched in horror as the Great Barrier Reef suffered back-to-back bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, losing fully half its coral cover in the process. The IPCC’s latest predictions for the two-degree world are dire: even if global temperatures stay under 1.5 degrees, 70–90% of reef-building corals will be lost. With two degrees of warming, this increases to 99%.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere that traps the sun's heat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has risen steadily since the nineteenth century and is now at it's highest levels in 800,000 years. As a result, global temperatures are also rising: 2020 was one of the hottest years on record. But the planet is not warming evenly. The polar regions are heating up five times faster than anywhere else on Earth. As a result, polar habitats are changing dramatically. Snow covers the Arctic for fewer days each decade, and the glaciers over Greenland and Antarctica are melting away. Sea ice is changing, too, getting thinner and covering less ocean. Polar bears depend on Arctic summer sea ice for hunting and traveling, but within a few decades, there might be none left. Changes in climate and habitat have other consequences for polar animals. Some adaptions that supported survival are becoming unhelpful or even harmful. For example, blubber keeps marine mammals warm in cold water (see page 13). As temperatures continue to rise, the same blubber could cause those animals to overheat. When days get longer, ptarmigan turn brown for camouflage when the snow melts (see page 20). If warmer spring temperatures melt snow before the days lengthen, birds that are still white will be more visible to predators. As climate chance continues, these and other polar species may find it harder to persist.

Even if the world were to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, elevated levels of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere – up from 270 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 420 parts per million today – will keep global temperatures high for centuries. Slow processes like melting ice masses, thawing tundra and rising sea levels are in effect irreversible once they begin. There are signs that some tipping points may have been breached already. What humans have done and will do over the century 1950 to 2050 will change the way the Earth functions for many thousands of years.

assuming existing policies are fully implemented, the global average temperature is likely to rise by 2.2°C to 3.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.12 A

by 2008 the arithmetic of climate change presented an almost unimaginable challenge. If the world were to stay within the range of carbon emissions that scientists deemed reasonable in order for atmospheric temperatures to remain tolerable through the mid-century, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves would have to stay unused in the ground. In other words, scientists estimated that the fossil fuel industry owned roughly five times more oil, gas, and coal than the planet could safely burn. If the government interfered with the “free market” in order to protect the planet, the potential losses for these companies were catastrophic. If, however, the carbon from these reserves were burned wantonly without the government applying any brakes, scientists predicted an intolerable rise in atmospheric temperatures, triggering potentially irreversible global damage to life on earth.

Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty and conflict.  US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, 2014.

In the 1950s, the Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass used new, detailed measurements of the infrared absorption bands and created an early computerized model of infrared radiative transfer. He calculated that a CO2 doubling would increase temperature by 3.6°C. Assuming that CO2 emissions would continue at their current rate, he expected that human activity would raise the average global temperature “at the rate of 1.1°C per century.”23 He warned that “temperature rise from this cause may be so large in several centuries that it will present a serious problem to future generations.”24

I write these words in May of 2011, the week after a huge outbreak of tornadoes killed hundreds across the American South; it was the second recent wave of twisters of unprecedented size and intensity. In Texas, a drought worse than the Dust Bowl has set huge parts of the state ablaze. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is moving explosives into place to blow up a levee along the Mississippi River, swollen by the the third “100-year-flood” in the last twenty years—though as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration noted at the end of 2010, “the term ‘100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.” That’s because 2010 was the warmest year recorded, a year when 19 nations set new all-time high temperature records. The Arctic melted apace; Russia suffered a heat wave so epic that the Kremlin stopped all grain exports to the rest of the world; and nations from Australia to Pakistan suffered flooding so astonishing that by year’s end the world’s biggest insurance company, Munich Re, issued this statement: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge.” And that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that on April 6, the U.S. House of Representatives was presented with the following resolution: “Congress accepts the scientific findings of the Environmental Protection Agency that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” The final vote on the resolution? 184 in favor, 240 against. When some future Gibbon limns the decline and fall of our particular civilization, this may be one of the moments he cites.

But since the beginning of our new century, global temperatures have been flat to declining, despite the continuing rise in CO2. None of the 20 climate models that the IPCC relies on predicted the declining temperature trends of the last ten years. Is something else at work here?

It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit,

If the global temperature rises by only four degrees Celsius over the next fifty years—and it’s probably going to do that—then all of the Appalachian forests will die. Already, the Elms and the Chestnuts are gone, and the Hemlocks and the Flowering Dogwoods. And I didn’t get a chance to climb them yet. Before we know it, the forest will just go away and die off.

If the temperature keeps rising, people will have to work at night and sleep during the daytime!

That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures.

Europeans and Americans have spent five centuries conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth in the name of human progress. They used their technological superiority to create the most efficient killing machines on the planet, directed against anyone and anything, especially indigenous cultures, which stood in their way. They stole and hoarded the planet’s wealth and resources. They believed that this orgy of blood and gold would never end, and they still believe it. They do not understand that the dark ethic of ceaseless capitalist and imperialist expansion is dooming the exploiters as well as the exploited. But even as we stand on the cusp of extinction we lack the intelligence and imagination to break free from our evolutionary past. As the warning signs become more palpable—rising temperatures, global financial meltdowns, mass human migrations, endless wars, poisoned ecosystems, rampant corruption among the ruling class—we turn to those who chant, either through idiocy or cynicism, the mantra that what worked in the past will work in the future. Factual evidence, since it is an impediment to what we desire, is banished

will collapse and temperatures will rise—and then the waters will. Global agricultural production will level off and then fall. What food remains will be local and not enough. And all these things will come to pass while people continue to argue about them. Until there is no more argument, because there is no more doubt.

These are among the many foundation stones of this new world we have built, and the work continues. I know all this seemed impossible a decade ago, when it felt as if everything was falling apart and our climate might be doomed. But everything we did mattered. All of it. We now know that we're going to keep global temperature rise below the most dangerous tipping points that climate scientists warned us about a decade ago. We can look our kids in the eye and tell them we didn't let them down. Now we can watch their dreams unfold.

These are among the many foundation stones of this new world we have built, and the work continues. I know all this seemed impossible a decade ago, when it felt as if everything was falling apart and our climate might be doomed. But everything we did mattered. All of it. We now know that we're going to keep global temperature rise below the most dangerous tipping points that climate scientists warned us about a decade ago. We can look our kids in the eye and tell them we didn't let them down. Now we can watch their dreams unfold." — Mary Anne Hitt, "A Love Letter from the Clean Energy Future

As early as 1959, at a symposium called “Energy and Man,” organized by the American Petroleum Institute to mark the centenary of the global oil business, the physicist Edward Teller told the industry’s most important executives, “Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth.” The temperature, Teller predicted, would rise, and when it did, “there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise.”3 But these kinds of warnings were easily ignored.

What you believe about climate change doesn’t reflect what you know,” said Dan Kahan, a professor at Yale Law School who studies risk perception. “It expresses who you are." To illustrate this point, Kahan cited the results of yet another survey by the Pew Research Center. This survey was designed to test basic scientific knowledge and it posed questions like “What is the main function of red blood cells?” When respondents were asked what gas “most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise,” 58 percent chose the correct answer: “carbon dioxide.” There was little difference in the proportion of Democrats and Republicans who gave the right response; among the former it was 56 percent, among the latter 58 percent. (Among Independents, 63 percent chose correctly.) But polls that ask Americans about their own beliefs about global warming show a significant partisan divide; in another Pew survey, 66 percent of Democrats said they believed that human activity was the “main cause” of global warming, while only 24 percent of Republicans did. This suggests there are many Democrats who don’t know what’s causing climate change but still believe humans are responsible for it and many Republicans who do know, yet still deny that humans play a role. And what this shows, according to Kahan, is that people’s views on climate change are shaped less by their knowledge of the science than by their sense of group identity. To break the political logjam, he argues, Americans need to find ways of talking about climate change that don’t require members of one group or the other to renounce their cultural identity. “If you show people there is some way of responding to the problem that’s consistent with who they are, then they’re more likely to see the problem,” Kahan told me. Kari Marie Norgaard is a sociologist at the University of Oregon who has studied how people talk about climate change. She, too, believes there’s a strong cultural component to Americans’ attitudes, but she sees the problem as reflecting the strategies people use to avoid painful subjects. Norgaard argues that it’s difficult even for people who are privately worried about climate change to discuss the issue in public because on the one hand they feel guilty about the situation and on the other they feel helpless to change it. “We have a need to think of ourselves as good people,” she told me. Meanwhile, the very lack of discussion about the issue feeds itself: people feel that if it really were a serious problem, others would be dealing with it: “It’s difficult for people to feel that climate change is really happening in part because we’re embedded in a world where no one else around us is talking about it.” “It becomes a vicious cycle between the political gridlock and the cultural and individual gridlock,” Norgaard went on. What could possibly break this cycle? Norgaard argues that if the nation’s political leaders would candidly discuss the issue “it could be very powerful. It could free up a lot of the hopelessness people feel and allow them to mobilize.” “I think there are probably multiple levels at which we could break this cycle,” she went on. And though, after more than thirty years of ignored warnings, the challenge has grown all the more daunting, she said, “I don’t believe we get to give up.

Gary’s made a bit of a name for himself. He’s always in the papers going on about climate change being a hoax. That’s why I was surprised ….’ ‘Surprised by what,’ prompts Harbinder because the singer seems to have dried again. ‘All the diners, the members of this club, were men,’ says Chris. ‘And they were all really rich and successful. … Then, after dinner, there was a speaker. She talked about climate change and – my God – she laid it on thick. Rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, thawing permafrost, temperatures only likely to rise, it’s a hundred seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock. I know a lot of this stuff and I was still depressed. But I expected Gary to argue, to shout her down. I mean, that’s been his schtick for the last few years, right? Global warming is cyclical, it’s all a ruse by lefties to shut down the coal business. That sort of thing. But he agreed with every word. They all did. Then I realised. They believed in climate change. They knew it was happening. They knew better than anyone, with all those directorships of oil companies and the like. They knew but they wanted to stop anyone else understanding the full extent of it. Because it was bad for business.’ – Chris Foster in Bleeding Heart Yard (2022) by Elly Griffiths

drop. Temperatures fall, which leads more ice to build up, and so on. After a while, the orbital cycle enters a new phase, and the feedback loop begins to run in reverse. The ice starts to melt, global CO2 levels rise, and the ice melts back farther. During the Pleistocene, this freeze-thaw pattern was repeated some twenty times, with world-altering effects. So great was the amount of water tied up in ice during each glacial episode that sea levels dropped by some three hundred feet, and the sheer weight of the sheets was enough to depress the crust of the earth, pushing it down into the mantle. (In places like northern Britain

Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy, since the predominantly non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north, even as the Whiter global north is contributing more to its acceleration. Land is sinking and temperatures are rising from Florida to Bangladesh. Droughts and food scarcity are ravaging bodies in Eastern and Southern Africa, a region already containing 25 percent of the world’s malnourished population. Human-made environmental catastrophes disproportionately harming bodies of color are not unusual; for instance, nearly four thousand U.S. areas—mostly poor and non-White—have higher lead poisoning rates than Flint, Michigan.

Global temperature and GDP are both rising, and each affects the other… We have to find the right balance between the two factors. If we focus solely on growing global GDP, we risk temperatures rising to such an extent that the negative impact on our well-being will more than offset the benefits brought about by extra growth. Yet, if we try to cut as much carbon dioxide as we can, out of a sense of panic, we could easily end up reducing human well-being to a degree that far offsets any environmental benefits we achieve.” -p. 46

Not so many years ago, schoolchildren were taught that carbon dioxide is the naturally occurring lifeblood of plants, just as oxygen is ours. Today, children are more likely to think of carbon dioxide as a poison. That’s because the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased substantially over the past one hundred years, from about 280 parts per million to 380. But what people don’t know, the IV scientists say, is that the carbon dioxide level some 80 million years ago—back when our mammalian ancestors were evolving—was at least 1,000 parts per million. In fact, that is the concentration of carbon dioxide you regularly breathe if you work in a new energy-efficient office building, for that is the level established by the engineering group that sets standards for heating and ventilation systems. So not only is carbon dioxide plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon-dioxide levels don’t necessarily mirror human activity. Nor has atmospheric carbon dioxide been the trigger for global warming historically: ice-cap evidence shows that over the past several hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels have risen after a rise in temperature, not the other way around.

It was a graph published by the WHO the previous year delineating key environmental issues deemed by the WHO to have the greatest impact on global health. The list included, among others: Demand for clean water, global surface temperatures, ozone depletion, consumption of ocean resources, species extinction, CO2 concentration, deforestation, and global sea levels. All of these negative indicators had been on the rise over the last century. Now, however, they were all accelerating at terrifying rates. Elizabeth had the same reaction that she always had when she saw this graph—a sense of helplessness. She was a scientist and believed in the usefulness of statistics, and this graph painted a chilling picture not of the distant future … but of the very near future.

But for 30 years the way this has all come about has given expert observers cause for increasing puzzlement. In particular they have questioned: the speed with which the belief that human carbon dioxide emissions were causing the world dangerously to warm came to be proclaimed as being shared by a ‘consensus’ of the world’s climate scientists; the nature and reliability of much of the evidence being cited to support that belief; the failure of global temperatures to rise in accordance with the predictions of the computer models on which the ‘consensus’ ultimately rested. But there was also the peculiarly hostile and dismissive nature of the response by supporters of the ‘consensus’ to those who questioned all this, a group that included many eminent scientists and other experts.

Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy, since the predominantly non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north, even as the Whiter global north is contributing more to its acceleration. Land is sinking and temperatures are rising from Florida to Bangladesh.

The core of the global bioplan is a simple idea. If every person on Earth planted one tree per year for the next six years, we would stop climate change in its tracks. The addition of those wonderful molecular machines, which pull carbon from our atmosphere, fix it in wood and bubble out oxygen in return, would halt the rise in global temperature and return it to a manageable level. Three hundred million years ago, trees took an environment with a toxic load of carbon and turned it into something that could sustain human life. They can do it again.

The ominous realities of climate change forced a shift in my perspective. Each year, it seemed, the prognosis worsened, as an ever-increasing cloud of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases—from power plants, factories, cars, trucks, planes, industrial-scale livestock operations, deforestation, and all the other hallmarks of growth and modernization—contributed to record temperatures. By the time I was running for president, the clear consensus among scientists was that in the absence of bold, coordinated international action to reduce emissions, global temperatures were destined to climb another two degrees Celsius within a few decades. Past that point, the planet could experience an acceleration of melting ice caps, rising oceans, and extreme weather from which there was no return.

On a global scale we have the example of pollution. Individual humans have freely burned fossil fuels and greatly increased the amount of greenhouse gases such as CO2, leading to a continuing rise in the earth’s temperature over the last century. The tiny particles also emitted have caused lung diseases and deaths. But each polluter gains more individually from his own actions than he loses, so he has no direct pressure to change.

Eventually, seven independent inquiries exonerated the climate scientists, finding nothing in the e-mails to discredit their work or the larger consensus on global warming. In the meantime, though, Michael Mann’s life, along with the environmental movement, was plunged into turmoil. Mann was among the scientists most roiled by the mysterious hacking incident. Four words in the purloined e-mails were seized upon as evidence that he was a fraud. In describing his research, his colleagues had praised his use of a “trick” that had helped him “hide the decline.” Mann’s detractors leaped to the conclusion that these words proved that his research was just a “trick” to fool the public and that he had deliberately hidden an actual “decline” in twentieth-century temperatures in order to fake evidence of global warming. The facts, when fully understood, were very different. It was a British colleague, not Mann, who had written the ostensibly damning words, and when examined in context, they were utterly mundane. The “trick” referred to was just a clever technique Mann had devised in order to provide a backup data set. The “decline” in question was a reference to a decline in available information from certain kinds of tree rings after 1961, which had made it hard to have a consistent set of data. Another scientist, not Mann, had found an alternative source of data to compensate for this problem, which was what was meant by “hide the decline.” The only genuinely negative disclosure from the e-mails was that Mann and the other climatologists had agreed among themselves to withhold, rather than share, their research with some of their critics, whom they disparaged. Given the harassment they had been subjected to, their reasoning was understandable, but it violated the customary transparency expected within the scientific community. Other than that, the “Climategate” scandal was, in other words, not one.

In the 2013 report, the IPCC concluded, 'Warming of the climate system is unequivocal (italics added) and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia ... It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause.' In 2015, the IPCC concluded that they are 'now 95 percent certain that humans are the main cause of current global warming' (IPCC 2015: v; italics added). The IPCC also suggested, on the basis of the existing evidence, a rise in global temperature will have 'severe and widespread impacts on ... substantial species extinctions, large risks to global and regional food security ... growing food or working outdoors,' as well as producing more extreme fluctuations in weather, including droughts, flooding, and storms. The conclusions of the IPCC have been endorsed and supported by over 200 scientific agencies around the globe, including the principle scientific organisations in each of the G8 countries such as the National Academy of Science in the United States and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom.

The initial eruptions in Morocco released clouds of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, which rapidly warmed the planet. It got so hot that strange ice formations buried within the seafloor, called clathrates, melted in unison all throughout the world’s oceans. Clathrates are unlike the solid blocks of ice we’re used to, the ones we put in our drinks or carve into fancy sculptures at parties. They are a more porous substance, a latticework of frozen water molecules that can trap other substances inside it. One of those substances is methane, a gas that seeps up constantly from the deep Earth and infiltrates the oceans but is caged in the clathrates before it can leak into the atmosphere. Methane is nasty: it’s an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, packing an earth-warming punch over thirty-five times as great. So when that first torrent of volcanic carbon dioxide increased global temperatures and melted the clathrates, all of that once-trapped methane was suddenly released. This initiated a runaway train of global warming. The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere approximately tripled within a few tens of thousands of years, and temperatures increased by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius.

For the first time in human history our planet has reached a concentration of four hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide, an amount that scientists have long held to be a tipping point into environmental catastrophe. It is widely accepted that one of the leading causes of this disaster is industrialized animal agriculture. As temperatures rise, global food shortages increase, and natural disasters take countless lives around the world, we must ask ourselves whether a taste for animal flesh is worth the increasing environmental devastation it has helped create.