Oct 5, 2018 3 min read

In 2015, nearly 200 nations around the globe signed on to the Paris Agreement, a deal aimed at capping the rise of the global temperature at “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. The countries involved were tasked with submitting voluntary plans for how they would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Then came the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, and his announcement a few months later that the United States would be pulling out of the Paris Agreement.

Diplomats are gathering this week in South Korea, and according to an AFP report, they are being asked to sign off on “a major U.N. scientific report that underscores the failure of their governments to take stronger action on climate.”

That U.N.’s climate science authority, the International Panel on Climate Change, was asked by the countries involved in the Paris Agreement to lay out what the world would look like if there were a 1.5-degree increase in the world temperature, and also to outline how difficult it might be to prevent a further temperature escalation.

According to AFP, the findings of the panel – a 400-page report based on 6,000 peer-reviewed studies – found that “1.5C is enough to unleash climate mayhem, and the pathways to avoiding an even hotter world require a swift and complete transformation not just of the global economy, but of society, too.”

The story noted that even with just 1 degree of warming thus far, “the world has seen a climate-enhanced crescendo of deadly heatwaves, wildfires and floods, along with superstorms swollen by rising seas.”

“I don’t know how you can possibly read this (U.N. report) and find it anything other than wildly alarming,” Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., told AFP.

One of the report’s authors said certain countries, including Saudi Arabia, have “threatened to be obstructionist,” and the AFP report said China is balking at some of the measures proposed in the document.

How the United States will respond to the report, under the current administration, is a major question mark.

As one report author said, “The U.S. could, as they have in the past, support the science. Or they could become obstructionist – maybe Fox News will decide to shine a spotlight on the meeting.”

Some observers are encouraged that the U.S. delegation, according to the State Department, will be led by longtime climate diplomat Trigg Talley.

Report co-author Henri Waisman, who is a senior researcher with the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, said never in the history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has there “been a report that is so politically charged.”

Waisman added that the report will give governments no definitive answer on whether the 1.5C goal can be achieved.

We can say that almost certainly, there is no chance of reaching that figure if nations such as China and the United States refuse to do their part.

There should be no doubt at this point, based on science, that humans are influencing the climate in a negative way, but in this country, especially, we have many people – including many in positions of power in the federal government – who choose, because of political reasons, to deny climate change truths, and instead take the path of deliberate ignorance.

The stakes are too high for this kind of blatant foolishness to continue.