Credit: NASA.
Trump’s policies would also be creating failed states at America’s doorstep. Here is what a 2015 NASA study projected the normal climate of North America will look like (under the kind of fossil-fuel-intensive growth Trump has promised). The darkest areas have soil moisture comparable to that seen during the 1930s Dust Bowl.
Our poorer neighbors to the south will be engulfed by near-permanent Dust Bowl or severe drought. At the same time, their coastal areas (and ours) will be trying to “adapt” to sea level rise of perhaps 6 or more feet by 2100 (rising as much as a foot a decade after that). For all but the wealthiest, abandonment will be the primary adaptation strategy.
Inevitably, over a hundred million people from Mexico and Central America will be trying to find a place to live that isn’t anywhere near as hot and dry, that has enough fresh water and food to go around. They won’t be looking south.
Tragically, Donald Trump combines xenophobia with a vow to be the world’s primary obstacle to preserving a livable climate for our southern neighbors. It’s like we would be setting fire to our neighbor’s house and farm — and then blocking efforts by the fire department to put the fire out AND at the same time condemning any notion that we have an obligation to house and feed them.
Trump would be creating the perfect conditions for failed states and violence in North America.
A world where President Trump succeeds in thwarting or reversing climate action is a world with dozens of Syrias and Darfurs and Pakistani mega-floods, a world with hundreds of millions of climate refugees in the coming decades, all clamoring to move to places that aren’t flooded or Dust-Bowlified, including parts of the United States.
It would be a world where everyone eventually becomes a veteran, a refugee, or a casualty of war. That’s something worth remembering this Veteran’s Day.
That’s just a small excerpt from a very good article taking a look at what climate change has already brought about, and how it’s going to get much worse. Yes, there are things we can do to help avert the worst, but thinking people already know we’re in this very late, and all we can do right now is to mitigate all the damage we have done. That mitigation requires cooperation and change. Two things Trump is incapable of are cooperation and change. He has vowed to go full bore ahead on dirty energy, ripping the earth apart in a quest for more, more, more, without one thought to the very near future. If you have children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and you voted for that maniac, you have just screwed them, and their future into the ground. Unfortunately, you decided to screw over everyone else, too.
Trump is a silver spoon idiot, a person who can barely think at all, is of little education,* doesn’t read, and doesn’t care about anything except himself. He inherited wealth, and an inflated sense of entitlement. That sense of entitlement is what drives him now, and in that quest, he will ensure he does his damnedest to hasten the death of most life on our planet, that life including yours and that of those you love.
*No, I don’t care if you didn’t go to college. Hell, I don’t care if you didn’t make it through high school. I do care whether or not you have learned throughout your life, whether you have made an effort to learn about things happening in the world. If you haven’t, and you’ve just sat on your ass letting any con man fill your head with shit, you deserve what you’ve brought down, but the rest of us? No, we don’t deserve that.
Full article here. In other climate news: Trump victory puts the chill on international climate talks. Court rules that children can sue the government over climate negligence.
Will Trump go down in history as the man who pulled the plug on a livable climate?
The fate of humanity is in the hands of a denier who pledged to kill domestic and global climate action and all clean energy research.
When I look at that map, and I consider that almost all the serious-science climate predictions have so far proved excessively optimistic, it seems ironic to the point of contrarianism that I feel a chill down my back.
I know the feeling, Pierce. I’ll be long dead by the time we resemble that map, but I’ll be here for the start of it, and oh fuck, I don’t want this to happen, I don’t, and I’ve been working, and fighting, and all for what? I know I need to snap out of this spiral of despair, but I don’t know how to do that right now.
It really annoys me that so many of these assholiticians who are so big on having a big army, protecting ‘Mercuh, bombing the shit out of anyone who is in any way different, are flat-out denying climate change. Especially since the US military views climate change as the greatest long-term threat to international stability, especially financial stability.
From Climate Change News :
Even ISIS has come about primarily due to climate change — the farms of Syria are dead and a shitload of unemployed, and young, Syrians — with no work, no support, no prospect of work — reacted to fear and economic insecurity the same way rural whites in the US did: by supporting an authoritarian movement.
Even if climate change magically left the United States alone, the damage done in the rest of the world will affect us. It will affect economic security, military security. It will affect prices. It will affect refugees and immigration. And it will destabilize our allies (or, if not allies, at least the ones we have bought and/or bullied into pretending they are our allies). Isolationism — which is half of Trump’s foreign policy (the other half is bomb the shit out of them) — is viable in the short term. In the long term, it is global suicide.
Ogvorbis:
Yeah, that’s in the Think Progress article too. All these people who voted for Trump because they are all upsetty about immigrants, and they don’t even fucking know what is driving immigration, so hey, let’s vote for a fucking idiot who will massively increase the need for immigration, yay. Damn dumbfucks.
This, however, is some actually good news. From Think Progress :
First, sorry for the double post. Second, there is a ‘T’ missing from ‘hink progress’. Sorry.
And you already had a link to the court case in your OP. Sorry. I’ll just give up now.
Ogvorbis, all fixed. :) Y’know, I read that story, and I really, truly wanted a fierce, feel good moment, but I didn’t get one. I’m quite pleased the case got as far as it did, but can you see that getting anywhere with the supreme court?
Caine @ # 2: I know I need to snap out of this spiral of despair, but I don’t know how to do that right now.
Likewise here, except for me it’s a spiral of anger. I’ve stayed home a lot this week, but expect as I get back into circulation I’m going to say some things that will lose me some friends.
For all but the wealthiest, abandonment will be the primary adaptation strategy
Hopefully, the wealthy will be hanging from lightposts, so they won’t really need an adaptation strategy. By the time the reality sinks in, I’ll be very surprised if it’s not pitchforks and torches. Lucky for us all, I’ll probably be dead and gone by then.
This is the world my children will live in.
How?