Data released this week by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University show that Earth’s average temperature between January and June of this year was the 3rd hottest half-year on record.
The other 3 hottest half-years on record since 1880, when people started keeping accurate records? You’ll remember them: 2015, 2016, and 2017.
“When a record is broken once, it’s a fluke. When it happens again, it’s a coincidence. When it happens three times, it’s a trend, but when it happens every single year, it’s a movement.”
–Sarah Green, environmental chemist, Michigan Technological University, reacting to the new data
This is the most recent part of a long-term warming trend, well documented since the late 1800’s and linked directly to carbon dioxide emissions mainly from fossil fuel combustion.
As the November elections draw closer, all of us Americans need to pay attention to the long game. We are continually barraged with hyper-partisan messaging about various issues; they may not be the basic questions we should prioritize highest. As examples, ask yourselves these questions:
- Will our current arguments about immigration, so hot in the news, make any sense at all, or will they in fact seem quite passe, in a relatively near term future in which tens of millions of new environmental refugees flee the inability of their homes to support their lives and create the need for an entirely new legal framework to either provide for their resettlement or ignore their plight?
- In what ways might the interests of Russia, a fossil fuel rich nation with land holdings in the arctic circle, align with those of the Western fossil fuel industry? Might that influence our politics in previously unanticipated ways? For example, might a political party in the U.S. accepting large amounts of money from fossil fuel interests possibly produce an elected president oddly obsequious to the Russian dictator-president? What nation on Earth, in the near term, benefits most from both assiduous fossil fuel use and (some) global warming?
- Will our arguments about how to provide health care for ourselves make any sense at all if we end up believing President Trump that climate change is a hoax (instead of believing virtually all scientists on the planet) and burn all fossil fuels available, raising our Earth’s surface temperature by 36 degrees Fahrenheit and making it uninhabitable for humans over most of its surface?
- Will the #MeToo movement have the lasting effect we hope for if both women and men suffer ever increasing economic headwinds in the near future due to climate change effects?
- In what way does our valuable argument about the rights of a fetus make any sense at all, if we are not planning for the rights of all fetuses, as soon as one-to-two generations from now, to inhabit a basically livable planet?
- Or, for that matter, for the rights of the children to whom we are reading bedtime stories right now, not to inherit a world in inexorable civil decay due to the unmanaged effects of climate change?
The point? All these issues are important. But they are only important if we are also working on the long game, that is, finding and executing a solution to climate change.
If we’re not working on the long game, the rest of those issues could, frankly, be relatively short-term problems.
My next post will be a scientific one, about how we really could lose it all. What that might look like, according to some scientific modeling. Or, if we’re alert and careful, how we might avoid it. Watch this space.
#rescuethatfrog