Climate Change: Impending Doom

Our efforts to combat climate change have been too little, too late.

Photo by Fabio Partenheimer

(SAN FRANCISCO, CA.) - The sobering report recently released by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that "the world is likely to surpass its ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — by the early 2030s.

"Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt."

Climate change is the major culprit while some of the problems stem from El Niño, which causes temperatures to rise. El Niño may subside next year, bringing somewhat cooler conditions.

When it does, it could bring even worse disasters than this year’s El Niño because climate change will have continued to warm the planet all the while.

It has long been known that humans impact our atmosphere severely and our unrelenting production of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) increase the effects of the naturally occurring "greenhouse effect" that keeps our planet habitable.

The more CO2 we pump into our atmosphere, the warmer the atmosphere gets. This is a scientific fact based on decades of scientific study.

The main cause of the increase in global average temperatures in recent history is not because of any natural cycle -- although natural cycles do exist -- it is because of man.

While humans cannot prevent El Niño, they could have done something about climate change. Anything that would have reduced greenhouse gasses would have helped.

While much of the world has taken steps to cut human emissions, experts continue to say that progress has been too slow to stop or reverse global warming.

As a result, all of humanity with suffer slow, painful, untimely deaths, increasing global temperatures will cause sea levels to rise and will produce more intense weather and changes in precipitation patterns, changes in crop yields, glacier melting, extinction of species and the spread of disease.

The effects of climate change are happening now before our eyes.

A severe and prolonged heat wave is occurring around much of the country. Temperatures exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit this past weekend: Sacramento 107 degrees; Las Vegas 107 degrees; El Paso 106 degrees; Phoenix 118 degrees.

Areas in New York and Vermont just saw as much rain in a day as is typical for all of July. Part of the Midwest is in a severe drought. Wildfire smoke recently blanketed the Midwest and Northeast giving U.S. cities at times the worst air quality in the world.

Our efforts to combat climate change have been too little, too late, and no brilliant energy breakthrough technology is around the corner that will save us from impending climate doom.

Unfortunately, we lacked the political will to combat climate change and now must live with the terrible consequences.