Long-Term Disaster Is Now The Best-Case Scenario October 1, 2019September 30, 2019 Yesterday I offered “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” with the editor’s note. (And last week: 16-year-old Greta Thurnberg’s call to action.) Trump and many of his followers believe it’s all a Chinese hoax.* And yet: Prologue The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization. Trump works against efforts to confront the climate crisis that could lead to the end of human civilization. Is that not, at he very least, a misdemeanor? The cockroaches, who will be here long after humans are gone, are laughing their little heads off. Read the whole thing? *Just as they believe the Mueller report was 448 pages of vindication — whereas, in the real world, more than 1,000 former Republican and Democratic federal prosecutors saw multiple felonies in Volume 2 and anyone who reads Volume 1 — Russia, if you’re listening — will see grave cause for concern. Trump ignored a surprise attack on our democracy — an attack that is ongoing, that is succeeding, and that, as commander in chief, he and Moscow Mitch do nothing to confront, oath of office be damned. Yet so effective is his rhetoric, tens of millions of still-Trumpers don’t care.