– on its current course the world will warm by 7 degrees by the end of the century.
Giving Trump’s determined assessment regularly spouted that climate change is a con thought up by the Chinese or various other groups, it seems odd the Trump’s administration published a report last month which, buried within its 500 pages, assumed there would be a 7 degrees Fahrenheit (about 4°C) rise in temperatures by the end of the century.
What is worse, is that the report does not base this on assumptions that the world has failed to cut carbon emissions, but rather that the planet’s fate is sealed. This statement was written to justify Trump’s decision to freeze fuel efficiency currency standards post 2020.
There are several things to say about this apart from ‘are you mad?!’. This report is arguing that the situation is so terrible that we shouldn’t bother to try to do anything about it. It is both stating that the problem is far larger than we thought, and a sensible solution is to do nothing whatsoever about it, that somehow what we do in the next 80 years will not have any impact whatsoever.
The report goes on to argue that abolishing the improvement in efficiencies post 2020 will only have a small impact and therefore is irrelevant. This seems such a stupid approach to such a big complicated problem as to be astounded that anyone thought it should ever be published in that form. Far from Trump’s usual rhetoric stating that climate change is a hoax or that it isn’t happening, Trump’s administration appears to have left from there to stating that we’ve already done too much to the planet for it to survive, that we should live without worrying about climate change, just emit as much carbon as we like because we can’t do anything about it.
It goes on to state that the world would have to make dramatic cuts to carbon emissions and therefore rely on here-to undiscovered technologies, and as this is not currently possible or economically feasible it should not be attempted.
I don’t know about your reasoning on this but my feeling is that the idea that you decide 80 years ahead of time that it is too hard to try as a country that is the richest in the world (and which incidentally is considered likely to be the hardest hit in the world by climate change) is just astounding. The current administration is stating this problem is too hard for us to solve and therefore we’re not going to take responsibility for it and just allow our country to lose large amounts of land to the sea by the end of the century.
An increasing number of people in America fully recognise the facts of climate change and the likely impact it will have over the rest of the century. Unfortunately the commander-in-chief has his head in the sand and is refusing point blank to look at all the evidence around him despite the majority of the people working in government wanting to plan for something that is almost definitely going to happen.