Guest clobberin’ time by David Middleton
As global warming continues, Trump wants to burn fossil fuels with an arsonist’s glee
By THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD
SEP 29, 2018Here’s some disquieting, if unsurprising, news: The world is nowhere near where it needs to be if we are to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. That’s the gist of a report to be delivered this week in South Korea by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an independent body providing scientific analysis on climate change. According to early details given to the Guardian newspaper, the report warns that barring drastic and near-immediate changes in how the world creates energy, uses transportation and grows food, we will fall short of the 2015 Paris agreement goal of limiting the global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above what it was in pre-industrial times. Currently, the global temperature is nearly 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial benchmark.
That means trouble. Glaciers already are melting. The shrinking ice cap could mean an ice-free Arctic in the summertime by the end of the century, a reduction that many scientists believe fuels a feedback loop: The less ice there is, the more solar energy the Arctic absorbs, increasing the water temperature and reducing the amount of ice still farther.
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