PD Editorial: Climate change forecast keeps getting worse

Anyone who grumbled about disruption from the recent climate strike and demonstrations and wondered what the fuss was all about should read the latest climate report from the United Nations about what climate change is doing to our oceans.

The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the stress from increasing temperatures and greenhouse gas levels is changing the oceans in dangerous and consequential ways.

Fish populations are declining. Ocean acidification is increasing and threatening coral reefs. Melting ice caps are increasing sea levels (making coastal flooding more prevalent) and changing the temperature and circulation systems in the oceans.

These disruptions are already having a global impact, one that will only get worse if we don’t successfully limit greenhouse gas emissions very soon.

The changes threaten seafood supplies and endangered marine species. Coastal regions will be devastated as commercial fisheries collapse and storms become more powerful, damaging and frequent. California already is feeling the effects in its coastal communities. ?U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilber Ross last week declared a fishing disaster here and in five other states. One of California’s historic and economically most important industries is at risk.

Meanwhile, climate refugees already are straining resources across the world, and the coming decades will see millions more if nations don’t act, now, to severely curtail greenhouse gas emissions.

“It is alarming to read such a thorough cataloging of all of the serious changes in the planet that we’re driving,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler. “What’s particularly disturbing as a scientist is that virtually all of these changes were predicted years or decades ago.”

No wonder young activists like Greta Thunberg are so passionate. She angered some with her strident speech at the United Nations, but adults should listen to her and others like her whose lives will be forever altered by climate change.

“How dare you!” she shouted. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

Given the ongoing refusal among too many American leaders to take the serious action necessary to deal with this threat rushing toward us, it is clear such lectures are needed.

Bold leadership is lacking in the current administration, though. Instead of trying to reduce greenhouse emissions, President Donald Trump, who predictably mocked Thunberg in a tweet, has been doing everything in his power to make them worse - including trying to stymie California’s efforts to reduce tailpipe emissions from vehicles.

This isn’t the first IPCC report that has sounded an urgent alarm. Last year’s report warned that the world had only about 12 years left to drastically curtail greenhouse emissions to avert catastrophic impacts from climate change.

Young people like Thunberg face the prospect of growing up in a world in which civilization is stressed to the breaking point because of the refusal to take these warnings seriously - and they are mad.

As they should be.