The United Nations Has Finally Given Up On Its Tenuous Hold On Climate Optimism

The United Nations has finally admitted that the goal of
keeping the world from becoming 1.5 degrees warmer
than the 18 century average. 

The famous 1.5 degree Celsius climate change goal is officially kaput. 

That figure was the goal set during the international 2015 Paris climate accord. 

According to that decade old plan, the world wasn't supposed to get more than 1.5 degree Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the mid 19th century average.   

The UN is throwing in the towel with that one. Many other climate experts have been saying for months or even years that the world would not achieve the goal.  

The 1.5 degree target is still nominally the UN's goal, but they've finally admitted it's completely unrealistic. So, it's now all about trying to deal with the hotter world. 

As CBC reported:

"In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming's harms. Officials say the world must now figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety."

The trick now is to figure out over the next several decades how to get the world's temperature back under 1.5 degree C above the 19th centurial average. 

As the Associated Press reports: 

"Instead of giving up, scientists and the U.N. officials recommend trying to limit excessive warming and then bring the temperature back down to the agreed-upon threshold. But it will still mean decades of increased weather-related disasters rising seas, extinctions and melting ice and glaciers."

The 1.5 degree Celsius threshold is rather arbitrary. It's not like things will be OK until we reach 1.5 degrees, then all hell breaks loose. 

As the world has warmed, we've seen a gradual increase in record heat waves, destructive, wild storms and deepening droughts. 

Things will  just get worse and worse the higher the temperatures get. But you need to have goals, and that 1.5 degrees was the global goal, set by the U.N. 

The time for that goal has passed. The world is now 1.4 degrees hotter than it was in the 19th century. This is based on a 20 year average. The next couple of years will boost the average further, considering a strong El Nino will warm the world further. 

The U.N's latest most optimistic scenario now has the world's warming peaking at 1.8 degrees Celsius, or 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit about levels that we saw nearly two centuries.  Then, the hope is, the world would eventually start to cool back down a little. 

This is if countries around the world pursue ambitious climate goals starting now. Good luck with that. I'm looking at you, United States. 

To do this, the world would have to cut planet warming pollution 55 percent by 2035, then getting rid of virtually all fossil fuel emissions by 2050 or so. I do not see the political will do this. Correct me if I'm wrong. 

Washington Post explains the consequences: 

"The dangers at the scale of warming will still be significant. Rising sea levels will engulf small island nations and submerge many coastal communities. Heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires and floods, which already cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, will come many times more extreme. Without aggressive adaption measures, global food production could decline by 14 percent."

Also, even if we get above that 1.5 degree threshold for several decades, then manage to go below it again, it won't solve all the problems the world's warming has caused. Perhaps a quarter of the world's glaciers will have permanently melted away. Species will go extinct. Some ecosystems will never recover. 

If nothing changes in terms of policies, global temperatures will rise to 2.6 Celsius (4.7 degrees F)  over mid-19th century levels.  Per the AP:

"The UN's report says every five years of delay in reducing emissions adds at least a tenth of a degree to peak warming, said report co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London." 

This is among the bleakest U.N. climate reports I have read. It carries the unmistakable tone of desperation, frustration and urgency - but not resignation," said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria."

Making the temperature of the world go down is a lot harder than making it go up.  

Wapo again:

"That's because it is far more difficult to take carbon out of the atmosphere that it is to release it, said Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and another lead author of the report."

We could plant million, or billions of trees to absorb carbon from the air. But those trees have to be planted somewhere.  Probably partly on agricultural land that should be used for food.  Then, if there's a forest fire, a big chunk of carbon absorption would be wiped out in a day.

We could build machines to suck carbon out of the air and store it underground. But we do not yet have the technology, or the money to do this on a large enough scale.  

For now, the world will keep warming. Maybe we'll get a temporary, semi-break around 2028 when El Nino ends and the Earth's temperature might go down marginally. But that will only be a blip, and the world will keep warming until humanity can get its act together. 

Since humanity has never truly gotten its act together, I'm not terribly optimist

RFK Jr Puts On The Tin Hat To Combat "Chemtrails"

RFK Jr. seems to have embraced the tin hat crowd's
obsession with "chemtrails" which are really jet
contrails made of ice crystals, but let's not let
a good conspiracy theory get
in the way of, you know, reality.

 Our esteemed Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to be trying on more tin hats for size.  

This time it's the chemtrail model of lunacy. 

This all came out last week, when another snake oil salesman, I mean, highly regarded doctor, Phil McGraw - you know him as Dr. Phil - hosted a town  hall interview with RFK Jr.  

Audience members had questions, as you can imagine. One of those audience members brought up chemtrails.

For the uninitiated, chemtrails are fictitious. But they're a fun conspiracy! 

"Chemtrails" are just contrails from passing high flying aircraft.  Water vapor and fine suit from burning jet fuel comes out of the plane's exhaust, and freeze into ice crystals in the frigid air of the upper atmosphere. If the humidity up there is high enough, you get a long trail of those ice crystals in the sky. 

They're basically just long, skinny cirrus clouds. 

However, the conspiracy theorists among us have all kinds of other ideas as to what's going on.  The conspiracies are all over the place, so it's hard to pick out exactly what these supposed chemtrails are doing.

 Is it a mind-control substance some government is spraying to control the minds of the world's populace somehow?  Or maybe they're spraying unwanted COVID vaccines on an unsuspecting population? Or they're trying to kill off a large percentage of the world's population for gawd knows what reason?

They're all ridiculous. But these weird stories have a lot of adherents. 

The fact that I am calling chemtrails fictitious will inevitably bring out all the conspiracy theorists and others who will whack me as part of the conspiracy that's hiding a secret government plot to spray the populace with various and sundry chemicals,  or something like that. 

Now, let's leave it to Dr. Phil and especially RFK Jr. to make this whole thing worse. 

Here's how it all played out, as Gizmodo reports:

"Toward the end of Dr. Phil's town hall, an audience member named Emily stated she was concerned about the existence of 'aerosol injections' of aluminum, strontium, and other purported toxins being sprayed into the skies - a statement that RFK Jr. completely took at face value when asked how he was going to address the issue.

'That's not happening in my agency. We don't do that. It's done, we think, by DARPA. And a lot of it now is coming out of jet fuel - so those materials are put in jet fuel," Kennedy responded."

Apparently, Kennedy is among the many in the tin hat crowd that blame DARPA for all the terrible things the "chemtrails" are supposedly doing. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is part of the U.S. Defense Department. 

Being the Defense Department, I'm not convinced that everything DARPA does is pure as the driven snow, but they certainly are not doing chemtrails. Or whatever that is. 

Our hero, RFK Jr, is going to end all this, though, don't you worry! At Dr. Phil's event, he added, "I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it. We're bringing on somebody who's going to think only about that, find out who's doing it and holding them accountable."

Oh, great. RFK Jr is going to go out and find some schmuck they can blame for........water vapor. 

I said RFK is making everything worse because in this case, anyway, he's going to sign on legions of people who will join the chemtrail train. Anything Trump - and by extension his minions - say, will just delight turn his MAGA fans into rabid followers of whatever their flavor of the day is. 

One day its trans people. The next it's Canada. After that, Trump wants to be the Pope. Or he'll somehow reopen Alcatraz as a prison. Then we move onto the chemtrails here.  It's hard to keep up.  

The thing you won't hear from MAGA and the chemtrail crowd is that jet airplanes do actually have a negative effect on us earthlings. Jets and other aircraft are big contributors to climate change. Global air travel and transport is estimated to be responsible for 3.5 percent of climate change. 

Sure, that's not a huge share, but every contribution hurts.  But since the Trump people say climate change is a "hoax" I'm sure his followers would much rather go down the chemtrail rabbit hole than pay attention to you know, actual science.  

Gross! Oklahoma Municipal Public Tornado Shelter Was A Dangerous Cesspool.

Residents of Sulfur, Oklahoma in a
municipal storm shelter in foul water
and broken chairs as a tornado
roared through the city. Incident
shows public storm shelters should
be maintained, inspected to ensure
public safety in storm emergencies. 

 One of the worst hit towns in last weekend's tornado outbreak was Sulfur, Oklahoma, where the downtown was largely destroyed, as were numerous homes. 

Not everybody has a storm shelter at their house, so many - but not all - towns and cities in Tornado Alley have public storm shelters where anybody can go to seek protection from dangerous tornadoes. 

However, Sulfur was a case study in what happens when a city doesn't maintain a storm shelter. 

People who arrived at Sulfur's storm shelter had to go down a steep flight of stairs (normal) only to find three inches of foul water on the floor and unsafe, broken chairs.  

Because repeated waves of tornado-warned storms passed over or near Sulfur Saturday night, people who sought shelter in this awful place had to stay there for three hours. For the elderly and disabled, standing for so long is an impossible order. 

One group of people - including one in a wheelchair - arrived at the storm shelter only to realize they couldn't get down there as the tornado bore down. At the last second, the group was able to get into a hotel just as the tornado began ripping downtown Sulfur apart. 

Laura Carter, a private caregiver, was in that group, told 2 News Oklahoma: "There's three inches of water that they are standing in for hours....Most of the people that are down there are in sandals or barefoot, and the chairs that are down there are rusted and falling through. They're falling through, they don't even have a place to sit for hours, as a tornado is ripping through our town."

Carter continued: "I ran into a city worker the other day who was actually down there helping us, and I asked, I was like, 'has the shelter always been flooded like this?' He said, 'Yes ma'am, our boss told us last year to go down there and pump all the water out and just leave the rusted chairs down there. I highly doubt we'll ever have to use them.'"

Famous last words, indeed. 

For any weather emergency, if there's a low cost way to protect the public, there should be one, even if the chances of actually having to use it in any given year are low. In Oklahoma's case, not everybody has access or can afford their own tornado shelter, so these municipal ones can save lives.

The television station says towns surrounding Sulfur have workable municipal storm shelters. 

As for Sulfur, the city has since condemned the terrible storm shelter as unsafe. Local residents and activists plan to lobby for a new, better one for the next time. 

I just hate to think what would have happened to someone who, grossed out by this storm shelter, left to seek another one, but ended up getting run over by the tornado in the process. 

 I hope Sulfur never gets hit by another tornado like this. But I also hope they build a safe, clean public storm shelter,  just in case.