The data are in: As expected, last year was easily the warmest on record. Global temperatures shattered the previous high, which happened to have been set just the previous year.
“Fifteen of the 16 warmest years on record have now occurred since 2001,” the administrators for both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a joint announcement this week. “Temperatures will bounce around from year to year, but the direction of the long-term trend is as clear as a rocket headed for space: it is going up.”
As the administrators went on to note, sea levels are rising, increasing by almost three inches in the last two decades. (That may not sound like much, but its impact is already felt on the Georgia coast.) The Arctic ice cap is shrinking, as are icesheets and glaciers. Greenland alone is shedding 300 billion tons of ice a year. The world in which mankind and every other species evolved is being altered before our eyes. And if previous patterns hold, 2016 may well top the record-shattering heat of 2015.
We cannot say that we weren’t warned. That is not a defense available to us. As far back as the 1970s, scientists and computer models have been warning that increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would drive global temperatures upward at a rate never before seen in the global climate record reaching back hundreds of thousands of years. Lo and behold, we can see it happening.
But some of course refuse to see. They refuse to understand. When confronted by the facts they retreat into a series of frustrating nesting-doll arguments, each hidden inside the other: The planet isn’t heating; if it is heating it is not caused by mankind; if it is heating and it is caused by mankind, then it’s probably good for us anyway; if it is heating and caused by mankind and not good for us, then there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.
Oh, and the whole thing is a conspiracy cooked up by scientists around the world as part of a plot to seize control of the economy. Because you know, that’s what scientists like to do.
That is not the behavior of someone confident in either their data or argument. Among other things, it requires you to believe that after decades of warnings by scientists, the climate has just happened to produce — all by accident — 15 of the warmest years on record in this new millennium. Such a string is plausible, but you shouldn’t bet your planet on it.
Nonetheless, an entire major American political party has made belief in that ridiculous argument a central test of loyalty, crippling the response by the nation whose global leadership on the issue is most essential.
“The climate is changing — it always has,” Jeb Bush, allegedly one of the more sensible leaders of that party, put it last month in New Hampshire. “That’s not any news flash, and the outcomes of that are still not determined. To create policies for today that will have some impact for 50 years from now is almost destined to be wrong.”
Only willful stupidity allows an intelligent person to make a statement like that.
Future generations will look back on this era and they will howl in indignation at our irresponsibility and self-indulgence.
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