The Los Angeles Times on climate disaster:

You can’t say the 2022 climate data coming out is surprising. But it sure is alarming.

U.S. federal agencies last week reported that 2022 was either the fifth- or sixth-hottest year on record. The 10 warmest years over the last 143 years have all occurred since 2010. Another study showed the amount of heat being taken up by Earth’s oceans reached another record high last year.

Meanwhile, the pollution that causes global warming just keeps rising. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased by about 1.3% in 2022 compared with the previous year, according to an analysis by the research firm Rhodium Group, marking the second year in a row that planet-warming pollution has gone up after declining earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The data highlight the immense disconnect between the symptoms our overheating planet is showing and what we are doing about the problem. And it’s another stark reminder that despite some recent progress on climate policy, such as the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country is still on a reckless path in the wrong direction. Earth is already about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was in the late 19th century, and we are continually at the precipice of greater suffering and loss.

These annual reports are indicators of the most important metrics of the health of our environment and should be far more distressing to Americans than the pace of inflation, interest rates or the price of gas. Yet they’re so painfully routine at this point that people seem to have grown numb to the implications.

Even more unrelenting is the data from Earth’s oceans, which are bearing most of the load of humanity’s production of greenhouse gas pollution by absorbing more than 90% of the warming. The rise in ocean temperatures has accelerated since about 1990 and “is so steady and robust that annual records continue to be set with each new year,” researchers stated in a paper published last week.

There are some bright spots in the recent data. Renewable energy surpassed coal to generate 22% of the nation’s electricity, a first since the 1960s. But some of the decline in coal-fired power generation was offset by an increase in the burning of natural gas, another fossil fuel.

The U.S. is also in a much better position compared to even a year ago, when the federal government had yet to enact significant climate policy. President Joe Biden’s signing of the Inflation Reduction Act last year changed that. While it’s the biggest step Congress has ever taken to address global warming, it’s not enough.

But political realities have also changed. Republicans now hold a narrow majority in the House and spent some of their first several days in power trying to score points in the nation’s culture wars by going ballistic over a nonexistent ban on gas stoves. If that is any indication of what’s to come, House Republicans will try to obstruct climate action instead of acting to protect the American people from an existential threat that’s growing worse by the year. That means state and local efforts to cut emissions will be more important than ever, just as they were during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Our leaders need to treat the climate crisis with the focus and urgency of a disaster endangering the lives of everyone on the planet. Because, after all, it is.