If we paid more attention to impacts of climate change, we would demand our governments take immediate and effective action, not merely offer promises that solutions will somehow be in place by 2050.

Warning signs are plentiful in 2023. NASA reports that current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years. The scientific agency says evidence of rapid climate change is compelling:

• Global temperature is rising,
• Oceans are warming,
• Ice sheets and glaciers are shrinking,
• Snow cover is decreasing,
• Sea level is rising,
• Ocean acidification is increasing,
• Extreme weather events are more frequent,
• Food supplies are threatened.

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information reported September 14. NASA, Berkeley Earth, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the European Copernicus Climate Change Service also rated August 2023 as the warmest August on record, crushing the previous August record by a huge margin.

Yale Climate Connections — August 2023 was Earth’s hottest August on record

Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas, measurements of which have interested scientists for decades. Today, CO₂ in the atmosphere is calculated by analysers using specialized sensors. Levels of CO₂ in days long ago are determined by analyses of cores drilled from polar ice. These contain small bubbles of air that provide a sample of the atmosphere when the ice was formed.

[2016] marked the first time in several million years that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 passed 400 parts per million. By looking at what Earth’s climate was like in previous eras of high CO2 levels, scientists are getting a sobering picture of where we are headed.

Yale climate 360 — How the World Passed a Carbon Threshold and Why It Matters

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (blue line) has increased along with human emissions (gray line) since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750. Emissions rose slowly to about 5 gigatons—one gigaton is a billion metric tons—per year in the mid-20^th century before skyrocketing to more than 35 billion tons per year by the end of the century. NOAA Climate.gov graph, adapted from original by Dr. Howard Diamond (NOAA ARL). Atmospheric CO₂ data from NOAA and ETHZ. CO₂ emissions data from Our World in Data and the Global Carbon Project. 

NOAA — Climate.gov

Climate change deniers have long claimed that “hockey stick” graphs like the one above falsely inflate the impact of anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. Those rejections of science are dismissed by a fact check done by Reuters, which is controlled by a family not known for anti-growth ideology.

In reviewing the records of CO₂ parts per million, I quickly noted that the rate of increase is accelerating.

A 2021 study published in The Annual Review of Environment and Resources, explains the lack of progress made to address factors underlying climate change:

Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990.

Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve. However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control.

Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?

Canada’s three western provinces are examples where dogmatic political-economic hegemony is exercised by vested interests. Governments have stopped serving the public good; they are servants of fossil fuel industries.

If we “keep up the pretence” that Canada’s oil and gas industry is critical for the country’s economic well-being and it will be “too hard” to transition, “how can we expect anyone else for whom it is actually much more difficult to do it?”

 Catherine Abreu, founder of Destination Zero, quoted by National Observer