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Yes, if you're looking for it, you can find the information on the grim heating up of this planet. Still, remarkably little of it has been headline-making news the way Donald Trump is, almost any day of the week, no matter what he talks about, including his acuity when it comes to whales.
Last June through December broke previous all-time monthly heat records, so perhaps it's not surprising that, in the United States in a year of unprecedented global warmth, another record was broken as well. Never before had this country experienced so many billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, 28 of them in all. They ranged from tornadoes, tropical cyclones, and Hurricane Idalia, which devastated parts of Florida, to drought, Hawaii's unparalleled Maui wildfire, and shocking levels of flooding. The total cost: almost $100 billion in damages. And according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "over the last seven years (2017-2023), 137 separate billion-dollar disasters have killed at least 5,500 people and cost $1 trillion in damage."
To put 2023 in context, as the New York Times recently reported, "Louisiana, Texas, and Massachusetts had their warmest years on record while Florida, Virginia, and Connecticut each experienced their second-warmest years. Phoenix posted the hottest month on record for any American city in July, with an average temperature of 102.8 degrees. Death Valley in California set a daily record of 128 degrees on July 16, followed by what NOAA called its 'hottest midnight temperature on record' -- 120 degrees. On Aug. 24, Chicago reached a record-breaking heat index of 120 degrees." And so it went in the U.S. last year.
Worse yet, when you think about the future, imagine this: not only is it an odds-on likelihood that 2024 will set new records for heat, but in the not-too-distant future, 2023 may retrospectively seem like a cool year. In other words, whether or not we care to admit it, all of us are now living on another planet. And in that context, consider what TomDispatch regular Stan Cox, author of The Green New Deal and Beyond, has to say about why we humans can't seem to focus our attention in the way that's necessary on what climate change is doing (and will do) to us, our children, our grandchildren, and this planet. Tom
As Climate Chaos Accelerates, Governments Avert Their Eyes
The Onrush of Other Crises Is No Excuse for Ignoring Climate Change
By Stan Cox
In December, the New York Times reported that "Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years and very likely the past 125,000." (Though it's not the Times's style, that latter figure should have had a couple of exclamation points after it!) Furthermore, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's chief scientist, "Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA's 174-year climate record -- it was the warmest by far." In fact, each of the six decades since 1960 saw a higher global average temperature than the 10 years that preceded it. In addition, every decade-to-decade increase has been larger than the previous one. In other words, the Earth's not just steadily warming; it's heating up at an ever-faster pace.
And you don't have to wait for the distant future to see the impact of such accelerated heating. Just look at current global data. Comparing 2023 to 2022, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported a worldwide rise of 60% in the number of deaths from landslides, 278% from wildfires, and 340% from storms. Worse yet, those of our fellow humans suffering the most from the impact of human-induced climate change aren't the ones causing it. More than half of the deaths reported by OCHA occurred in low- to lower-middle-income countries, and 45% of those killed lived in countries that produce less than one-tenth of one percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Imagine that for (in)justice!
Putting an end to global warming should be an overwhelming moral imperative for every nation on this planet. But climate-change stories, extreme as they may be, almost never lead the news, nor does dealing with the phenomenon seem to be at the top of any leader's list of national priorities. How about last month's COP28 global climate summit in Dubai? It produced an agreement that committed the world's nations to doing" well, essentially nothing.
With the news cycle stuck in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of sudden, compelling crises and unending wars, world powers seem almost willfully blind to the possibility that the global environment (and with it, civilization itself) is spinning out of control -- and not in some distant future but right now.
Long Emergencies
With the recent COP28 agreement, the rich nations have at least finally acknowledged that fossil fuels are indeed a problem. Still, they continue to reject a planned, systematic phase-out of oil, natural gas, and coal on an ambitiously expedited timetable (as laid out in proposals for a global Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty).
Governments, it seems, always have on hand some other dire emergency that supposedly justifies setting climate change aside. Perhaps the closest the rich countries have ever come to seriously tackling the subject of greenhouse gas emissions, which might be thought of as a long emergency, was in the various U.S., European, and global Green New Deals of 2018-2019. But those inadequate proposals were soon eclipsed by the Covid-19 pandemic and a still-surging rise of far-right extremists who consider global warming a completely off-the-charts subject. Then, in 2022-2023, just as interest in climate was rising again thanks to scary new reports from the world's climate-science community, the Russian invasion of Ukraine elbowed global warming out of our field of vision, while a stunning war-related spike in fossil-fuel prices killed off any immediate interest in reducing carbon emissions.
Then, last fall, the genocide in Gaza began. In November, TomDispatch's Tom Engelhardt wrote that "while the nightmare in the Middle East is being covered daily in a dramatic fashion across the mainstream media, the burning of the planet is, at best, a distinctly secondary, or tertiary, or" well, you can fill in the possible numbers from there" reality." He certainly wasn't suggesting, nor am I, that the Palestinians are getting too much attention. On the contrary, they need even more of it, but the climate crisis simply can't be lost in the shuffle.
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