Enjoy your winters with no snow and summers in the broiler:
Over the past two decades, the 2 degrees Celsius number has emerged as a critical threshold for global warming. In the 2015 Paris accord, international leaders agreed that the world should act urgently to keep the Earth’s average temperature increases “well below” 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 to avoid a host of catastrophic changes.
The potential consequences are daunting. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 2 degrees Celsius, virtually all the world’s coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear.
But global warming does not heat the world evenly.
The Washington Post feature article is another wake- up call that'll be ignored by policymakers in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry =cough= Republicans =cough= even at this late, and potentially irreversible, stage. It comes on the heels of a report from the Copernicus Climate Change Service that July 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, evidenced by a super hot Europe and warm Arctic (recall the video of the roaring glacier melt in Greenland earlier this month?).A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark.
Here's a map that accompanies the Washington Post feature, so you can see what parts of the country are experiencing the biggest jumps in temperature (click to enlarge):
(Source: Washington Post)
Climate change is not just a national security issue, it's a world security issue. Rising sea levels, extreme weather, crop failures, starvation, mass population migrations, and species extinctions are just some of the effects we're likely to reap from fiddling while the Earth burns.
When the United States, at the direction of dimwit demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord to pander to the fossil fuel industry and spite President Obama, we undercut the one global achievement on climate change in the past several decades. Now we are literally having hell to pay for having Trump and his Republican vandals doing everything they can to bring a climate apocalypse upon us and and the rest of humanity.
