The Climate Is Ignoring Our Safe Words
And Musk blew up our ride off-planet
Links are at the end, broiling.
“Europe is warming at an alarming rate, with temperatures rising at twice the global average, scientists at Copernicus, the EU’s Earth observation programme, have warned in a report published on Thursday.”
A month or so ago, although it seems much longer than that, we wrote about the most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warning that humans were about to blow past the most optimistic warming target for keeping the planet from endless climate catastrophe. The target, warming held to 1.5 degrees Centigrade above the preindustrial average, is no more than 10 years away absent drastic action.1
Yesterday, the European Union’s climate tracking project, the Copernicus Climate Change Service, released a report showing that the average temperature across Europe during the past five years has been 2.2 degrees Centigrade above the preindustrial average, making it warmer than even the flaccid Paris Agreement no-really-we-mean-it long-term target of 2.0 degrees. And warming in Europe lags Arctic warming.2
Europe’s faster heating is partly due to the fact that warming is stronger over land than over sea and to the interaction with the Arctic, which is warming even faster than the rest of the continent.
Another alarming consideration is that we are currently in a La Niña cycle, a periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, which makes La Niña periods colder and El Niño’s warmer. A new El Niño cycle is expected in the next couple of years.
Late last year the World Meteorological Organization released its short-term projections for temperature rise, estimating that the world will exceed a 1.5 degree increase over preindustrial averages at least once during the years 2022-2026. We wrote about this in the context of a wildly optimistic David Wallace-Wells bit on global warming in the New York Times, and things have not gotten better since then.3
The silver lining in all the bad news is that we’re getting a free preview of how bad things will get if we don’t take immediate, dramatic measures to curtail production of carbon fuels and other pollutants.
Which we’re not gonna. Somewhere in this fetid swamp of climate news we found John Kerry, Biden’s climate ambassador, indicating that our climate fate rests all but entirely on what fossil fuel companies are willing to do in mitigating global warming, which, he said, clear-sightedly, seemed to be not a lot.4
Kind of odd to see a government factotum shrugging off the government. Or not odd, maybe; just you don’t always see one being honest about it.
It’s a ketamine day, I’m late leaving to go get drugged, and I’m still not going to finish this thing today. And I’m taking the weekend off, is what I’m telling myself.
Today’s music, from Finom, is just excellent.
Finom, “Fantasize Your Ghost.”5
That’s all I got, Comrades. Be well, take are, subscribe if you like—it’s free unless you want to pay.
Not necessary, when you're leaving it all up to Exxon anyway. They'll make whatever deals need making.
I don't suppose Kerry commented about the political necessity of making a deal with Manchin.