Climate Change: Some Effects Irreversible

As the Republican Party continues to seek to deny that climate change is happening, the scientific community is becoming more convinced that not only is climate change happening, but that some effects may already be irreversible.  Will world governments act to address the impending disaster?  Probably not.  And if the GOP captures control of the U.S. Senate, expect nothing to be accomplished in America over the next two years.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

The Earth is locked on an “irreversible” course of climatic disruption from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the impacts will only worsen unless nations agree to dramatic cuts in pollution, an international panel of climate scientists warned Sunday.

The planet faces a future of extreme weather, rising sea levels and melting polar ice from soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases, the U.N. panel said. Only an unprecedented global effort to slash emissions within a relatively short time period will prevent temperatures from crossing a threshold that scientists say could trigger far more dangerous disruptions, the panel warned.

“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts,” concluded the report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which draws on contributions from thousands of scientists from around the world.

The report said some impacts of climate change will “continue for centuries,” even if all emissions from fossil-fuel burning were to stop. . . . "The window of opportunity for acting in a cost-effective way — or in an effective way — is closing fast,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University geosciences professor and contributing author to the report.

The report is the distillation of a five-year effort to assess the latest evidence on climate change and its consequences. . .

A succession of IPCC reports since the 1990s have drawn an ever-clearer connection between human activity and climate change. But Sunday’s “synthesis report” makes the case more emphatically than before, asserting that the warming trend seen on land and in the oceans since the 1950s is “unequivocal” and that it is “extremely likely” — a term that the IPCC uses to denote a 95 percent or greater probability — that humans are the main cause.

While not addressed in the previous post, in 1956 the GOP respected and believed in science.  Today's GOP does not.  Again the cause?  The ignorance embracing Christofascists/Tea Party. 

GOP/Christofascist Continue to Deny Global Warming is Occurring

When it comes to closing one's mind, shoving your head in the sand and ignoring objective reality, no on e does it better than today's Republicans and their masters in the Christofascist/Tea Party base of the GOP.  A case in point is this year's climate data.  January 2014 was one of the warmest January ever, yet because of localized cold weather in the eastern United States, the climate change deniers are maintaining that global warming is a hoax and that it is not happening.  What's frightening is that the idiocy prone members of the GOP base can't see beyond their own back yard to realize that local experiences do not always tell the full story.  A piece at Media Matters looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

Snowstorms and cold weather chills swept from the Midwest to the East Coast in January, closely followed by conservative media snow-trolls casting doubt on global warming. But what the conservative media didn't mention was that the world as a whole was experiencing warm temperatures, leading to January becoming the 347th consecutive warmer-than-average month and the fourth warmest on record.

On February 20, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), released the findings that January 2014 experienced global temperatures 1.17°F warmer than the 20th century average, making it the fourth warmest January on record. NOAA data shows that the last time the planet experienced a month colder than the 20th century average was February 1985 -- 29 years ago.

How could this be, when Fox News is telling you that the snowstorms in the United States are a reason to doubt global warming? The answer lies beyond the lower 48 states, which make up only 1.5% of the Earth's surface. While some regions in the contiguous U.S did experience a colder-than-average month (none a record cold month), most of the globe did not.
Further, while it may have felt like an unusually cold January, frigid winter temperatures used to be the norm in many parts of the country. NOAA's findings state that the cold air "blasts" through the Midwest and East Coast were "highly unusual compared to the 21st century, but not so unusual compared to the late 20th century." So the commotion in the conservative media over the recent cold weather spells may have been less about weather anomalies and more about weather amnesia.

Sadly, I increasingly find it difficult to have anything but contempt for Republicans and the knuckle dragging Neanderthals of the GOP base.   One either needs to be clinically insane, have had a lobotomy, be a racist or a religious fanatic to be a Republican.  Sane, rational individuals who rely on facts and logic simply are no longer welcome in the GOP.