Atlas of Human Suffering

The Associated Press has a new article on deadly climate change: UN Climate Report: Atlas of Human Suffering, Worse, Bigger

I would recommend reading it for yourself. Commentary in brackets [ ] is mine.

Deadly with extreme weather now, climate change is about to get so much worse. It is likely going to make the world sicker, hungrier, poorer, gloomier and way more dangerous in the next 18 years with an “unavoidable” increase in risks, a new United Nations science report says.

[“About to get so much worse” implies it is not already pretty bad, which it is. There is no “likely” either, it’s guaranteed to make the world far worse off – Admin]

And after that watch out.

[No – the 18 year time line is dead wrong. The danger is already here, right now and only gets worse, year-by-year – Admin]

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said Monday if human-caused global warming isn’t limited to just another couple tenths of a degree, an Earth now struck regularly by deadly heat, fires, floods and drought in future decades will degrade in 127 ways with some being “potentially irreversible.”

[This is interesting because their (finally) saying just a few tenths of a single degree means degrading in 127 ways. However, “potentially irreversible” is dishonest, none are reversible – Admin]

“The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health,” says the major report designed to guide world leaders in their efforts to curb climate change. Delaying cuts in heat-trapping carbon emissions and waiting on adapting to warming’s impacts, it warns, “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”

[Climate change is an extinction level event, which is far worse then “human well-being and planetary health” once it reaches critical wet-bulb temperatures – Admin]

Today’s children who may still be alive in the year 2100 are going to experience four times more climate extremes than they do now even with only a few more tenths of a degree of warming over today’s heat. But if temperatures increase nearly 2 more degrees Celsius from now (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit) they would feel five times the floods, storms, drought and heat waves, according to the collection of scientists at the IPCC.

[“May still be alive” is stretching it. At these claimed temperature increases, most of humanity will be dead. Not due to “hot temperatures” but due to starvation as wet-bulb temperatures exceed plant respiration rates resulting in massive crop failures. Most mammals will have already gone extinct or be in such massive decline that they cannot survive and none will be available for human consumption at that point. We can only guess at how many “times” flooding and storms will occur, but it will be massive and likely far higher then they are claiming here as excess heat energy results in enormous rates of evaporation and resulting storms, including droughts. – Admin]

Already at least 3.3 billion people’s daily lives “are highly vulnerable to climate change” and 15 times more likely to die from extreme weather, the report says. Large numbers of people are being displaced by worsening weather extremes. And the world’s poor are being hit by far the hardest, it says.

[Bolded emphasis is mine, because many people still do not realize how deadly this already is. The “large number of people being displaced” is already in 2022 hundreds of millions. – Admin]

More people are going to die each year from heat waves, diseases, extreme weather, air pollution and starvation because of global warming, the report says. Just how many people die depends on how much heat-trapping gas from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas gets spewed into the air and how the world adapts to an ever-hotter world, scientists say.

[What this sentence does NOT tell you and should is the existing heat-trapping gasses already in the atmosphere are not being removed and these temperature increases are now absolutely certain as a result. The “depends” implies that there are some solutions to this predicament, of which there aren’t any. Mammals (including humans) can only “adapt” by relocating, but their food supply cannot and is dependent upon available land, soil, weather, temperature and seasons – all of which are increasingly imperiled, with the end result being massive die-off. – Admin]

“Climate change is killing people,” said co-author Helen Adams of King’s College London. “Yes, things are bad, but actually the future depends on us, not the climate.”

[This is true (first part) and a complete lie (second part). Humans do NOT have the means to control the climate or to change this outcome unless we figure out a way to mitigate excess heat-energy being trapped by the atmosphere. The M.E.E.R.S. project is the only one I know of that might do this, but it’s not been tried. The implications that humans can dictate their own future is deny the physical reality of what is unfolding, and that is what makes this second part a lie – we have created the future we are going to get, by releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other gasses into the atmosphere. Extreme heat is now virtually guaranteed. – Admin]

With every tenth of a degree of warming, many more people die from heat stress, heart and lung problems from heat and air pollution, infectious diseases, illnesses from mosquitoes and starvation, the authors say.

[True – and the nutritional content of food crops declines, which ultimately is a global loss in calorie content and thusly, the ability to survive. There are also numerous species going extinct and in severe decline that humanity depends on for food. This will only drastically worsen as temperatures increase. – Admin]

The report lists mounting dangers to people, plants, animals, ecosystems and economies, with people at risk in the millions and billions and potential damages in the trillions of dollars. The report highlights people being displaced from homes, places becoming uninhabitable, the number of species dwindling, coral disappearing, ice shrinking and rising and increasingly oxygen-depleted and acidic oceans.

[And there it is. “At risk” actually means they are going to die. – Admin]

Some of these risks can still be prevented or lessened with prompt action.

[Hopium at its worst. Which risks can be “prevented”? Prevention means “it will not happen” and none are preventable. The promise of “prompt action” is the same hopium spewed for years and years (decades) that something will be done to prevent this, yet nothing of substance has transpired and to this very day, nothing of substance is being done to “prevent” any of this. Hopium, pure and simple. The stupid and empty promise that “somebody else” will do this and take responsibility. There is no “prompt action” occurring that will prevent any of this. – Admin]

“Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”

[All true, all warned about right here, many, many years ago and ignored just like everywhere else. Do not expect “action” now either, because you will be greatly disappointed. – Admin]

The panel of more than 200 scientists puts out a series of these massive reports every five to seven years, with this one, the second of the series, devoted to how climate change affects people and the planet. Last August the science panel published a report on the latest climate science and projections for future warming, branded “code red” by the United Nations.

[Yeah, and that’s definitely a huge problem. A global climate emergency exists where time is absolutely critical and they wait 5 – 7 years to provide “update”. That’s just stupid beyond belief. Real-time assessments, updates and reports were necessary over twenty years ago. The process is fatally flawed and quite literally, failing humanity and the entire biosphere. – Admin]

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of The Nature Conservancy, who wasn’t part of the latest report, calls it the “Your House is on Fire” report.

[Hayhoe is a phony optimist. Her misguided optimism is part of the problem. One of the reasons she’s become a darling of the media is because she preaches hopium, not because the science being told is accurate or complete, because it’s not. – Admin]

“There’s real existential threats,” report co-chair Debra Roberts of South Africa told The Associated Press.

Since the last version of this impacts panel’s report in 2014, “all the risks are coming at us faster than we thought before,” said report co-author Maarten van Aalst, a climate scientist for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, mentioning floods, droughts and storms. “More of it will get really bad much sooner than we thought before.”

[And there it is again – exactly like I told readers, many times. They’re constantly updating their “assessments” because they can’t keep deceiving the world about what is happening right in front of their eyes. Past reluctance, scientific reticence, institutionalized thinking and unwillingness to take a bold stance has led the world to absolute disaster by the scientist themselves who SHOULD have been screaming the alarms decades ago. There was already ample evidence then and what has been collected and assessed since is proving to be catastrophic for human survival, and yet despite this body of scientific evidence, they’re STILL unwilling to unify and demand the world’s attention like they should. They seem to be content with writing reports and pushing paper versus establishing significant climate actions. – Admin]

“Every bit of warming matters. The longer you wait… the more you will pay later,” said report co-chair Hans-Otto Poertner of Germany told the AP in an interview.

By 2050, a billion people will face coastal flooding risk from rising seas, the report says. More people will be forced out of their homes from weather disasters, especially flooding, sea level rise and tropical cyclones.

[Not true. By 2023 a billion people face coastal flooding risks (already happening now). This can only worsen, i.e., it is virtually unstoppable. You can’t replace the missing ice. – Admin]

If warming exceeds a few more tenths of a degree, it could lead to some areas becoming uninhabitable, including some small islands, said report co-author Adelle Thomas of the University of Bahamas and Climate Analytics.

[Also not exactly true. “Some areas” imply that it will be minor, when in reality, it will be major regions where wet-bulb temperatures make human and crop survival untenable. Downplaying this is very normalized now with science papers, they do not want to tell the world just how bad it will be. – Admin]

And eventually in some places it will become too hot for people to work outdoor, which will be a problem for raising crops, said report co-author Rachel Bezner Kerr of Cornell University.

[A problem? Why not just spell it out? Crops will fail. People will starve. – Admin]

Some of these climate change harms have been warned about for years, even decades, and have become reality, now written in the past and present tenses. Others are still warnings about future woes fast approaching.

[And everyone just ignored it to their own peril. – Admin]

Monday’s 36-page summary, condensed from more than 1,000 pages of analysis, was written by scientists and then edited line-by-line by governments and scientists with that final summary approved by consensus Saturday during a two-week virtual conference that occurred while Russia invaded Ukraine. In the final hours, a Ukrainian delegate made an impassioned plea that the war not overshadow the climate change report, some authors said.

Study authors said much of Africa, parts of Central and South America and South Asia are “hot spots” for the worst harms to people and ecosystems.

[And so is the American south-west. Drought conditions are already extreme. Global migration is actually the result of deadly climate change now. – Admin]

The report has a new emphasis on the mental health toll climate change has taken, both on people displaced or harmed by extreme weather and on people’s anxiety level, especially youths worried about their futures.

[The youth do not have a future. They have a right to be justifiably angry. The world has failed them. – Admin]

If the world warms just another nine-tenths of a degree Celsius from now (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the amount of land burned by wildfires globally will increase by 35%, the report says.

And the rest of the living world won’t be spared either, with the report warning of climate change extinctions. Already two species — the mammal Bramble Cays melomys in Australia and Central America’s golden toad — have gone extinct because of climate change. But much more will come with every bit of warming, said Poertner, the German co-chair.

[I don’t follow specific species going extinct too closely, but I know it’s more then just two. Coral reefs worldwide are collapsing, which are the breeding grounds of the world’s fisheries. – Admin]

One of the biggest changes in the report from previous versions emphasizes how crucial a key temperature threshold is scientifically and for people and how exceeding it, even if only a few decades, can cause permanent damage.

[Can cause? Will cause. Already causing. And the notion that this will occur for a “few decades” is utterly laughable. These are irreversible changes unless the trapped atmospheric greenhouse gasses are actually removed and then wait about a thousand years for temperatures to restabilize. That’s isn’t going to happen. – Admin]

In the 2015 Paris agreement, the world adopted a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, which was then further cemented when a special IPCC report in 2018 showed massive harms beyond that 1.5 degree mark. This new report found that threshold is even more important, but scientists do note that the world does not fall off a cliff after that mark.

[More dishonesty and hopium. The world has already fallen off the “cliff” in reality. These temperature increases are not stoppable. They increase, worsening each year because we are still making gigantic contributions to greenhouse gasses; and no effective means to reduce these contributions has been employed. Nor can humanity replace ANY of the missing ice now melting into the world’s oceans. The “massive harm” is already well underway. And we are already beyond the 1.5 degree mark, but science loves to pretend this is still somehow manageable when it is not. – Admin]

Because the world is already 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial time and emissions are still rising, not falling, the vast majority of future scenarios show temperatures are on track to shoot well above 1.5 degrees, hitting the mark in the 2030s. So some officials began to count on going over that threshold and coming back down a decade or so later with still-to-be-proven expensive technology to suck carbon out of the air or by some other means.

[Untrue. The world is already past 1.5C degrees warmer NOW. Emissions are still rising. Temperatures are on track to exceed at least 4C and in many scenarios, 8C. How fast is still guesswork, but the world is in fact on a deadly trajectory. The ridiculous “going over that threshold claim” is FALSE. The planet is not a thermostat that humans can simply turn down when they want to, the global heat inertia takes thousands of years to regulate, which means we are quite literally irreversibly committed to extreme temperatures and the notion that we can reduce these quickly (in just a few decades) is 100% bullshit. The unproven, unbuilt, vaporware technology to reduce emissions from the atmosphere by “sucking them out” is a fantasy, that utterly fails to even address the sheer volume of air that must be “processed” (it cannot be done – ever). These are all absolute lies being spewed. – Admin]

Monday’s report says that if that overshoot happens, “then many human and natural systems will face additional severe risks… some will be irreversible, even if global warming is reduced.”

[Some risk? All. Humanity does not have the ability to reduce global warming now on a meaningful time scale. – Admin]

Countries need to do more to adapt to warming, with rich countries needing to do a better job giving financial help to poorer nations to adjust to climate change caused mostly by the developing world, the report says. But there are limits to what adapting can accomplish and sometimes — like in the case of sea walls — technical fixes to lessen harms in one place will make it worse somewhere else, the report says.

Amid all the danger signs, experts said they want to shy away from doom.

[Yeah, hopium is always the better choice. Not. Because it leads to inaction. – Admin]

“Fear is not a good advisor and never is,” German vice chancellor and minister for climate and economy Robert Habeck told the AP. “Hope is the right one.”

[Bullshit. Fear is a great motivator, but worrying about the “economy” is where it’s always at, so this is what you can expect from these people. The future doesn’t matter as much as the “now” and how much money can still be made. Hope is for people who always expect OTHERS to do what needs to be done. It is a deferment of responsibility and accountability. – Admin]

Hayhoe said what’s needed is realism, action and hope.

[Then start telling it like it already is and stop pretending otherwise. Until then, I won’t be listening to you. – Admin]

“It’s really bad and there’s a good chance that it will get worse,” Hayhoe said. “But if we do everything we can, that will make a difference. Our actions will make the difference… That’s what hope is.”

[A “good chance”? Why lie? And why pretend that we will or are doing everything that we can when we clearly are doing very little? The empty promises that “our actions will make the difference” is to defy the ongoing reality that our actions are NOT making any difference. Nor will future actions make any meaningful difference. I know these scientist realize that future temperatures are baked-in and irreversible on human time-scales, but they sure don’t want to tell you this fact. They keep pretending that we can magically solve this now with technology that does not exist; efforts that are not happening; and actions that are not taking place. This is dishonesty at it’s finest and it is leading to MORE inaction and denial, not less. They always couch this with the proverbial “If” too. “IF” DOES NOT EXIST. “IF” IS NOT HAPPENING. “IF” MEANS INACTION. – Admin]