The slow motion crisis

The latest climate news is like the news before that, and before that: Highly alarming:

Soaring temperatures. Unusually hot oceans. Record high levels of carbon pollution in the atmosphere and record low levels of Antarctic ice.

We’re only halfway through 2023 and so many climate records are being broken, some scientists are sounding the alarm, fearing it could be a sign of a planet warming much more rapidly than expected.

In a widely shared tweet, Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, called rising ocean and air temperatures “totally bonkers.” . .

While the records are alarming, they are not unexpected due to both the continued rise of planet-heating pollution and the arrival of the natural climate phenomenon El Niño, which has a global heating effect.

Whether the broken records are a sign of climate change progressing beyond what climate the models predict, or are the outcome of the climate crisis unfolding as expected, they remain a very concerning signal of what’s to come, scientists said.

“These changes are deeply disturbing because of what they mean for people this coming summer, and every summer after, until we cut our carbon emissions at a much faster pace than we’re currently doing,” Jennifer Marlon, research scientist at Yale School of the Environment, told CNN.

The world is already 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in preindustrial times, and the next five years are predicted to be the hottest on record.

“We’ve been saying this for a long time – as polar scientists and as climate scientists – we’ve been saying you can count on the next few decades to consistently get warmer,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, told CNN. “We’re not going to turn back until we actually do something about this.”

This topic has been talked to death, but talk is cheap. I did a quick review of the shifting right wing orthodoxy on climate change over the past 35 years or so, and it looks roughly like this:

Mid-1980s to 2000: Climate change is a myth. The Earth’s temperature fluctuates for all sorts of reasons, and human-caused factors are minor to non-existent.

2000-2015ish: Anthropogenic climate change may be happening, but the extent to which it’s happening is being greatly exaggerated by environmental radicals, and the climate scientists who’ve been captured by their radical ideology. Attempts to ameliorate anthropogenic forcing will make things worse rather than better.

2015-2023: Climate change is happening, probably, but again it’s all very exaggerated, plus we should definitely be focusing on how private industry can make as much money as possible from addressing all this, since Big Government can’t fix it, because Big Government can’t fix anything.

I expect that by 2030 or so this discourse will have devolved in a series of nihilistic shrugs.