Comment 130439

By Ryan (registered) | Posted October 28, 2019 at 12:18:00 in reply to Comment 130437

I'm tempted to Rs;dr this post, but let's play ball.

Like most humans, AOC occasionally engages in hyperbole as part of her rhetoric. Normal people understand this, while hyper-partisan Republican operatives pretend not to understand what she's doing so they can attack her.

What Sanders, Gore et al. were warning about in the 1980s and 1990s was that if we did not act meangingfully to reduce carbon emissions, we would not be able to prevent global warming. And they were correct: the average global temperature is already around 1 degree Celsius warmer than it was at the start of the industrial era, and half the increase has occurred in the past 30 years.

What the IPCC is warning now is not that we have a decade or so to prevent global warming - that ship has already sailed - but that we have a decade or so to prevent catastrophic runaway global warming due to tipping points in Arctic ice loss, thawing permafrost, larger, more extreme wildfires and so on.

You can tell RedState is being disingenuous here when they cite Katharine Hayhoe in defence of their thesis that we need to calm down, since Hayhoe is actually saying, "Every action matters. Every bit of warming matters. Every year matters. Every choice matters." Hayhoe doesn't like the 10-12 year deadline because she worries that it will suggest a lack of urgency, not an excess of it.

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

There are no upcoming events right now.
Why not post one?

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds