Can Civilization Survive What’s Coming?

A thousand years from now, when some vaguely human-like machine digs through the ashes of the Twenty-First century and tries to figure out what happened to those once-thriving animals called Homo sapiens, it may be confused about why an intelligent species that could build rockets and write songs like “Imagine” couldn’t heed warnings of its own destruction. A key question for future historians of the universe: How stupid were those humans anyway?

 A firefighter watches the Canyon Fire as it burns near
 homes on September 25th, 2017 in Corona, California.

A new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the gold standard of climate science, outlines in frightfully stark terms what it would take to keep the earth’s temperature below 1.5 C of warming, which is the threshold for avoiding catastrophic climate change like the collapse of rain forests and coral reefs, rapid melting of the ice sheets that would swamp coastal cities around the world and heat extremes that could lead to millions of climate refugees.

Read the story from Rolling Stone by Jeff Goodell - “Can Civilization Survive What’s Coming?”

Will Trump go down in history as the man who pulled the plug on a livable climate?

-       by Joe Romm

Donald Trump - the pugilist is about to
deliver a knockout blow to climate action.

The shocking election of Donald Trump on Tuesday night is a turning point in the history of climate action, and therefore the history of homo sapiens. That’s because whatever warming, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and Dust-Bowlification we commit to is irreversible on a timescale of a thousand years.

Tragically, America has elected a man who has repeatedly called global warming a “hoax” and who put a climate science denier in charge of his EPA transition team. We’ve elected a man who has vowed to kill the Paris climate deal, end all efforts to help other countries deal with climate change, stop domestic climate action, reinvigorate coal, and zero out all research into climate science and clean energy.

I’ve always tried to face unpleasant facts head on. And while I had become considerably more optimistic about the possibility of averting catastrophe in the last two years, it was always the case that a quarter century of dawdling and ignoring the ever more dire warnings of climate scientists had left the climate on life support with no room for error.

Read the Think Progress story - “Will Trump go down in history as the man who pulled the plug on a livable climate?”