Ghosts scare climate facts – Pasadena Star News

We all knew, all of us smartypants with our heads not willingly in the hot sand for some malicious political reason, that climate change posed a threat to global health.

As with the new coronavirus, a threat not only to humans – zoo lions are dying from the virus, just as free-rangers are dying from the heat of the savannah.

The planet is dying of global strangeness, and we’ve known that for decades. Well, the rocks will be fine and the rivers will come back; creatures won’t do so well.

But a threat to national security? This is fairly new, similar to revelations in recent years that the practical Pentagon has long taken a realistic view of global warming instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

What, again, an ungodly number of Americans do, for political purposes that are hard to understand, unless they are not really political and are just some sort of generalized antipathy to their little ones. -children, the little sulky ones.

So I don’t know, maybe two American minds stuck in the mud will be changed by the sober militarist report released last week by the spy masters in the office of the director of national intelligence.

The “main takeaway” from their summary: “We believe that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to US national security interests as physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions increase over the region. way to meet the challenge. Global momentum is building for more ambitious greenhouse gas emission reductions, but current policies and commitments are insufficient to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Ghosts quote the reality: Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, global temperatures have risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius and, at current rates of increase, they will reach the dreaded 1.5 ° C rise by the end. of this decade. The cause is not the sunspots or the normal changes in weather and climate that the lunatics cite; the cause is us.

And the following line of the report gets to the heart of the matter: “Countries are arguing over who should act sooner. Which is reminiscent of what really is the worst argument for doing nothing about global warming, and yet it is still curiously the one often advanced by California climate deniers: why should we spend money on it first. tackle the problem before anyone else?

These are often the same people who cite the fact that if we were a nation we would have the fifth largest economy in the world. When this economy demands clean energy, for example, everyone needs to be careful or be left behind.

The intelligence report goes on to address the other benefit of going green: “being competitive to control the growing transition to clean energy” will be a major economic goal for countries and businesses over the next 10 years. Why not us, rather than, well, China?

Not that there won’t be international waters disrupted by the heat and hurricanes that are coming in the short term, say the secret agents: risks of instability and need for humanitarian aid.

Of course, the reports were released at the request of a White House keen to have something to show on the global warming front as it heads to the UN climate summit in Glasgow which begins on next month.

Because the Big Coal senator recently wiped out any chance of pushing President Joe Biden’s Clean Electricity Program through the current Congress. So now we can go to Scotland and say, well, we are trying. Want to join us ?

Larry Wilson is a member of the editorial board of the Southern California News Group. [email protected].