The coming climate disaster

Our planet is like a skydiver in free fall approaching the point when it will be too late to open the parachute and avoid disaster. He should have pulled the rip cord long before and now there is barely enough time to open the chute and survive the landing, bruised and with a couple of broken bones but alive. But the skydiver has no intention of pulling the cord. He seems to believe he will survive a collision with the ground at terminal velocity. The chances of that are are zero.

That’s where we are now when you consider two set of facts. One is the new report on climate change by thirteen agencies of the U.S. government. The study, the 4th National Climate Assessment, concluded that climate change is real, a product mainly of human activity, and happening fast with some of the consequences already here and worse effects on human life, health and quality of life, and the economy yet to come unless we act immediately and decisively. The other set of facts involve the attitudes and behavior of the U.S. government, still the key actor in preventing a climate calamity.

The reaction of the U.S. government has been worse than just doing nothing; especially under this administration that has compounded the trouble while torpedoing efforts by every other government to take concerted action. To use a different analogy than the skydiver, we are driving toward a wall fast and instead of hitting the brake hard we are stepping on the accelerator.

The administration has taken hundreds of actions that amount to hitting the gas. Trump pulled the United States out of the most significant international effort to curb climate change, the Paris accords. The administration has shredded hundreds of environmental rules meant to curtail greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. A different study recently found that the lives of millions of people worldwide are already being cut short by air pollution. Since the creation of the EPA in the 1970s, the U.S. has seen progress in improving air quality. The Trump administration is doing everything imaginable to bring back the bad old days.

The reaction to the climate assessment by Trump and his White House public relations people has been predictable. To deny the undeniable. To cast doubt on the science on the basis of nothing more than wishful thinking and the interests of the powerful fossil fuel industry. 

“I don’t believe it,” said President Trump flatly when told that climate change will bring with it a ten percent reduction in GDP. About the report in general, Lindsay Walters, a White House mouthpiece, said it was based on the most extreme scenarios and therefore inaccurate. The people with no science credentials are critiquing the work of the government’s own scientists. It’s as if the space program had been run by White House public relations people instead of NASA. Imagine the kind of disaster that would have been. That is where we’re headed on climate.

The new assessment is just the latest in a series of increasingly alarming warnings by governments, NGOs, and international groups of scientists. For instance, in October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which brings together almost all of the world’s best climate scientists, warned that drastic action to curb climate change is required to prevent a global disaster. The difference is that the new report comes from the U.S. government and draws on many examples of things that are already taking place in this country, micro-catastrophes that are happening to Americans for whom these calamities are not small at all.

Despite vigorous efforts by the Trump administration and interested corporate players to create a smokescreen, the debate about climate change is over. Even the administration knows that. That’s why the government released the climate assessment on a Friday, and Black Friday at that. The administration has lost the argument and now the strategy is just to keep the American people in the dark as much as possible.

Americans know that climate change is real despite all the attempts to confuse and deny. But they don’t yet have a sense of the urgency and the magnitude of the problem. This is the last call to avoid climate catastrophe. The American people must make the politicians feel the heat big time.