Bread and CircusesA few excerpts here from an excellent op-ed piece by climate scientist Peter Gleick (@petergleick)...
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It's not as though we weren’t warned. Scientists have been sounding the alarm about growing climate risks for decades. Despite repeated warnings, we have failed to adequately mitigate or adapt to climate change.
Incredibly, leading policymakers and pundits continue to deny scientific reality. In 2020, after an earlier series of devastating wildfires, then-president Donald Trump dismissed concerns over climate change, telling one California official “I don't think science knows” about global warming. “It'll start getting cooler, you just watch.”
Five increasingly hot years later, Trump is continuing to ignore the science during the Los Angeles disaster, preferring instead to point fingers at California water policy, diversity and inclusion efforts, endangered fish, and his political opponents.
These fires were unambiguously influenced by human-caused climate change. Global temperatures are accelerating upward — 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history, and all 10 of the hottest years have been in the last decade, continuing a century-long trend of warming.
Extreme hydrologic events, including floods and droughts, are accelerating, and Southern California is intensely dry. Los Angeles has received essentially no rainfall in over 10 months, with the driest start to a rainy season on record, parching soils and vegetation and setting the stage for extreme winds to intensify and spread the fires.
We know what’s coming, but we also know what to do. In addition to aggressively accelerating the energy transition away from fossil fuels, changing individual behavior, and reducing carbon emissions from other sources, we have to expand efforts to build resilience to unavoidable impacts.
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Yes, we do know what to do. But the question is — WILL it ever be done?
FULL OP-ED ➡️ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/los-angeles-fires-force-us-to-confront-our-dystopian-present/
#Politics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
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