It makes no difference
By 
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is starting to issue its latest series of big summary reports on the state of climate science, in the lead-up to the international convention in Glasgow in November:
Reacting to the report’s publication, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry said the report underscored the “overwhelming urgency of this moment.” U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he hoped it could be a “wake-up call” for global leaders ahead of COP26.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said the report contained no real surprises. “We can still avoid the worst consequences, but not if we continue like today, and not without treating the crisis like a crisis.”
Climate scientists said it is “unequivocal” that human influence has warmed the global climate system, with observed changes already impacting every region on the planet.
Some of the changes researchers observed in the climate were described as “unprecedented,” while others — such as continued sea level rise — were projected to be “irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.”
The report shows that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming since 1850-1900, and finds that averaged over the next 20 years, global temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
The U.N. climate panel says “strong and sustained” reductions of carbon emissions and other greenhouses gases would limit climate change. Benefits such as improved air quality would come quickly, while it could take 20 to 30 years to see global temperatures stabilize, it adds.
The IPCC report makes clear that it is not just about temperature. It says climate change is bringing different changes in different regions — and all will increase with further global heating.
These changes include more intense rainfall and associated flooding, more intense drought in many regions, coastal areas to see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, the amplification of permafrost thawing, ocean acidification, among many others.
It follows a series of mind-bending extreme weather events worldwide. For instance, in just the last few weeks, floods have wreaked havoc in Europe, China and India, toxic smoke plumes have blanketed Siberia and wildfires have burned out of control in the U.S., Canada, Greece and Turkey.
Policymakers are under immense pressure to deliver on promises made as part of the Paris Agreement ahead of COP26. Yet, even as global leaders publicly acknowledge the necessity of transitioning to a low-carbon society, the world’s dependency on fossil fuels is expected to get even worse.
Climate change is the ultimate example of the sort of problem that leads to massive market failure, which of course is one of two main reasons why right wingers in America have been in furious denial about it ever since it began to become a high profile political issue more than 30 years ago now. (The other reason is that doing something about it would cost rich people money in the short term). It features:
(1) The tragedy of the commons in the most extreme form.
(2) Externalities that are very difficult to internalize.
(3) Massive free rider and holdout problems.
All these things are just different ways of saying it’s a collective action problem, and we’re not good at dealing with collective action problems because of Freedom, most particularly the freedom to make as much money and live with the maximum possible convenience now, even if it totally screws the entire planet X years from now, and even when X is a number that keeps getting smaller ever-more rapidly.
All this has been a said a thousand times before, but I want to add one mordant note to the narrative that isn’t emphasized enough.
What do Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Dianne Feinstein, and a whole lot of other members of the very top of the American political elite all have in common at this moment?
Answer: Every one of these people will be dead 25 years from now, and it’s still possible to believe that climate change isn’t going to get really bad until then, or at least not until fairly close to then.
This belief is getting harder to sustain, however. I can barely make out the Flatirons — massive thousands of feet tall slabs of rock on the western edge of Boulder, Colorado — from the mesa five miles away, because the haze from smoke in the air is so bad, even though there are no wildfires of significance in the entire state of Colorado at the moment. But with much of the western United States now burning every summer, it makes no difference.