Ok so we’re not going to do what we have to do to prevent the worst so can we please do the next thing down?
No, of course not. We haven’t done it to this point so what reason is there to think we’ll do it now?
In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming’s harms. So now the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety, officials say.
Earth is soon going to exceed the safe temperature threshold agreed upon by the world in the 2015 Paris climate accord because of warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas, according to a bleak first-of-its-kind report issued by the United Nations Environment Programme Wednesday.
Of course it is. Look around you. More cars rolling off the assembly line, more planes filling up the airports, more container ships taking more cars to more distant places – nothing is going to stop the juggernaut.
Instead of giving up, scientists and U.N. officials recommend trying to limit excessive warming and then bring the temperature back down to the agreed-upon threshold. But it still will mean decades of increased weather-related disasters, rising seas, extinctions and melting ice and glaciers.
Yup, I recommend that too, and no doubt so do lots of other people, but it’s not going to make any difference. Nothing is.
“We were unable to stop the runaway train of global emissions to avoid 1.5 C of warming,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who wasn’t part of the report. “Now overshoot scenarios require us to stop the train quickly and to back it up. Is it our best hope? Absolutely. Is it likely? Absolutely not.”
Exactly so. It’s painfully obvious. We keep making the train go faster and faster; we can’t stop.
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