Climate alarm

For many years, climate change deniers – funded by hydrocarbon industry think tanks and sophisticated media campaigns – managed to inject a certain amount of doubt concerning global warming, but a rash of devastating hurricanes and last year’s wildfires in California have begun to shift public opinion.

Last spring’s European elections saw Green parties all over the continent do well, and polls indicate growing alarm among the public.

A number of different European parties, including the British Labour Party, are pushing a “Green New Deal For Europe” based on a call by the United Nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

The European Green Deal proposes using public investment banks to fund much of the plan, which is aimed at keeping rising temperatures to 1.5 degrees centigrade. While the price for rolling back emissions will certainly be high, the costs for not doing so are far greater, including the possibility that worldwide temperatures could go up by as much as 5 degrees centigrade, a level that might make much of the world unliveable for human beings.

A jump of that magnitude would be similar to the kind of temperature rise the world experienced at the end of the Permian Era, 250 million years ago. Called the “Great Extinction,” it killed 96 percent of life in the sea and 70 percent on land.

A major reason for the Permian die off was the expansion of cyanobacteria, which produce a toxic cocktail that can kill almost anything they come in contact with. Such cyanobacteria blooms are already underway in more than 400 places throughout the world, including a large dead zone in the Baltic Sea. Some New York lakes have become so toxic that the water is fatal to pets that drink from them.

The major fuel for cyanobacteria is warm water coupled with higher rainfall – one of the consequences of climate change – that washes nutrients into lakes and rivers.

Of the 195 countries that signed the Paris Climate Accords, only seven are close to fulfilling their carbon emission pledges. And one of the world’s biggest sources of global warming gasses, the US, has withdrawn.

If all 195 countries met their goals, however, the climate is still on target to reach 3 degrees Celsius. Even if the rise can be kept to 2 degrees, it will likely melt the Greenland ice cap and possibly the Antarctic ice sheets.

Greenland’s melt would raise ocean levels by 24 feet, the Antarctic by hundreds of feet.

Excerpted from: ‘Climate Catastrophe Comes for Europe’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org