"If you look, for example, at the Northern Hemisphere, which is where most of us live, and you ask the question when do we cross the 2-degree warming--2-degree Celsius warming--threshold for the Northern Hemisphere if we continue with business as usual burning of fossil fuels? I showed in an article several years ago in Scientific American we crossed that threshold before 2040, in the late 2030s. So we are on the way, on our way to blowing past the 1.5-degree Celsius mark and crossing the 2-degrees Celsius threshold in a matter of, you know, depending on how you define it, it really doesn't matter. Is it two decades, is it three decades, it hardly matters. In order to avoid crossing those thresholds we need to bring our emissions down dramatically. Arguably more dramatically than implied in this latest IPCC report."
We have already passed too many tipping points to avoid some of the climate's most devastating effects. Many scientists theorize the world has begun a sixth mass extinction.
We are going to just have to deal with what we have wrought and aggressively institute federal policies to mitigate further damage.
The question is, are we?
According to Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist and co-author of the IPCC report, "It's extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5C target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that."
Not with this administration.
Michael Mann wrote in October 2016 that Donald Trump was "a threat to the planet."
About Trump's rollback of Obama-era emissions standards, Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, stated:
"Trump got the Koch Bros what they wanted, another half-decade or so of their business model, even at the expense of breaking the planet."
We aren't through yet.
We need to support aggressive climate-change policy, like the "Green New Deal" Democrats are touting as part of their agenda to help right our current trajectory.
We need to take the fossil-fuel industry head-on.
As long as there is a profit motive, there will never be sufficient action to curb carbon emissions.
It only means the future of our planet, our children, grandchildren, and beyond.
Once it's over, it's over.
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