I’m very cross with myself. My last two articles were about Trump saying he might invade Greenland, and then about Trump declaring that he would annex Canada (but no threat of physical violence so far, just extreme economic pressure).
This article, by the same token, would have been about Trump turning the devastated Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, with the United States taking a “long-term ownership position.” Once a real-estate shill, always a real-estate shill.
Trump does understand how the media work, however, and making fantastic and outrageous claims that have to be rebutted is the best way to keep the media from talking about what he’s really doing (i.e. removing all legal, constitutional and customary restraints on the presidency).
Most journalists know what he’s up to but still feel obliged to bat away each fantasy as he throws it out. So I was going to write a third Trump piece in a row, about Trump’s vile but preposterous plans for the Gaza Strip – until I checked the ‘Copernicus’ website (as I have taken to doing at the start of each month) and saw that the ‘anomaly’ is now +1.75°C.
‘Copernicus’ monitors the Earth System for the European Union, and its website is very quick at drawing together observations from all over the planet to estimate each month’s average global temperature. The ‘anomaly’ is how much higher that temperature is than it would have been without the greenhouse gases emitted by human civilisation.
Two years ago, after about a century-and-a-half of industrialisation and growing carbon dioxide and methane emissions, the ‘anomaly’ was just reaching +1.2 degrees C higher average global temperature. We would have reached +1.3 degrees, at the current rate of emissions, around 2028, and +1.4 degrees around 2033. Bad, but at least predictable.
Then, in June 2023, the whole Earth System took off, and in only one month the average global temperature was +1.5 degrees higher. It has never dropped back down again, and the anomaly for the whole of last year was +1.55 degrees. In the last three months of 2024, however, it was always above +1.6 degrees – and last month (January) it was +1.75. Two years ago, conventional scientific predictions put us at +1.75°C in about 2040.
Yet the leading ‘mainstream’ climate scientists, rather than running through the streets screaming that disaster is nigh (an entirely reasonable response), have tried to downplay the seriousness of what is happening.
It was just a bigger El Nino, they suggested. (No, it began before that cyclical warming event and continues long after it finished).
You can’t really be sure this is the trend until you have ten or twenty years of data, they say. (So you think we should wait that long before we declare an emergency?)
The media and most of their customers are ignoring this terrifying trend completely because the Tangerine Toddler is having a tantrum. A thousand words have been written and spoken about Trump’s various diversions and distractions for every single word addressing what may be an existential threat to our current global civilisation.
Note that I did not say ‘the human race’, whose survival is probably not at risk. However, somewhere above an average global temperature of +2.0 C mass population movements and consequent great wars are almost inevitable.
That’s a political prediction, but the reason the Paris Agreement settled on a ‘never exceed’ target of +2.0 C a decade ago was that between there and +3.0 C almost all of the feedbacks would be triggered. So it’s easy to imagine that once we pass +2.0 C, a succession of feedbacks may automatically and inexorably carry us up to +3.0 C.
I am not saying that we are doomed, but a simple linear projection of the current warming trend would deliver us to the +2.0 C world by early next year. That is far from certain, of course, but it has definitely entered the realm of possibility. A wiser civilisation would be discussing emergency measures right now, even if actions take longer.
What actions would those be? Prompt and radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, of course, even if they inconvenience large numbers of people. But also direct measures to hold the heat down (‘geoengineering’), because it’s the heat that triggers the feedbacks and the feedbacks are the killers.
What are the chances that any of those actions will actually happen? I wouldn’t say none, because if I’m right this year will be far worse than last year in terms of wild weather, and next year far worse than that, and eventually enough people may actually understand what is happening and what must be done to stop it (if that is still possible).
Have a nice day.
