Leaving a legacy of disasters

Don’t they have children?

Have climate change deniers forgotten that it’ll be their own children who’ll face the consequences?

I wrote “children” – not grandchildren or great grandchildren -- because the report issued Monday by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the brutal ramifications of ignoring anthropogenic global warming will assail humanity (along with the world’s flora and fauna) much sooner than previously predicted. Perhaps by 2040, when deniers’ kids will still be around and wondering what the hell daddy was thinking.

The report made it clear that the catastrophic effects of global warming and sea level rise are no longer next century problems, so many generations in the future. The year 2040 is not a distant abstraction. (Hey, with a little luck and less stingy medical insurance, I could still be alive in 2040.)

Twenty-two years hardly provides the cushion that those who disparage peer-reviewed climate science need to say, “If I’m wrong, by then we’ll have the technology to alter the weather or cleanse the air of carbon pollution or air condition the troposphere or transport rich white guys and their paramours to a distant green planet.”

None of that’s gonna happen. Not enough time. Too bad. Unless world leaders implement policies that limit global temperature increases to only 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Age averages, the U.N. report warns that our children will be subjected to escalating disasters in agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, disease control. They’ll endure ever more awful heat waves, wildfires, storms, blizzards, droughts and coastal flooding – something already plaguing life and threatening real estate values in South Florida. Not to mention social upheaval, when inhabitants of superheated equatorial regions realize that their very survival depends on migration.

You’d think, as deniers ponder what they’ve bequeathed their heirs, that a document based on 6,000 peer-reviewed climate studies might leaven their stubborn rejection against any remedy that might offend oil and coal interests. Carbon fuel providers fund plenty of faux research that churns out contrarian talking points, but surely there’s a voice in the deniers’ collective subconscious whispering, “The overwhelming consensus – 98 percent of the world’s climate scientists — is that you’ve betrayed your own children.”

Sorry kids, but the stock dividends and the campaign contributions from the carbon energy sector have been so sweet.

The disturbing report finds that the goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement (signed by leaders of 174 nations and the European Union) to limit global warming to 2°C was too lenient to prevent a global catastrophe. New findings over the last three years indicate that the target should be at least 1.5°C. According to the 728-page report, that half-degree difference would limit the decline of the world’s marine fisheries by half, would save half the corn harvests and cut losses of insects, plants and vertebrates by half or more.

Stave off that additional half-degree of warming and there might be some chance, however meager, that some of the world’s coral reefs might survive. The half-degree cooler temperature might slow the melting of polar ice, which in turn would lessen sea level rise – that’s us folks – by two inches.

Of course, the average global temperature has already risen 1°C since the Industrial Age. And we’re already reaping the whirlwind. Arctic sea ice is fast disappearing. Sea levels have risen an average of more than eight inches since 1880. California, Brazil, North Korea, Puerto Rico, South Africa and most of North Africa are suffering historic droughts. Wildfires of unprecedented breadth and intensity menace the western states.

Descriptions of weather events require, with ever more frequency, the use of the superlative degree, usually tacking an “e-s-t” to the modifier. Hurricane Michael, in the most recent and fearsome example, churned across the overheated Gulf – four to five degrees above what used to be called normal – to become the

strongest hurricane to ravage the Florida Panhandle since we’ve been keeping records. Last month, Hurricane Florence would have been the wettest hurricane, with three feet of rain, except for Hurricane Harvey last year, which dumped 50 inches on Houston.

Extreme storms added to a growing list of worst-ever droughts, wildfires, heat waves, floods. And record heat temperatures, with

2018 on pace to be the fourth hottest year on record. After 2015, 2016 and 2017 (Fort Lauderdale, which recorded 89 days with a high temperature in the 90s back in 1960, registered

122 days over 90° last year. No doubt, you already noticed).

Yet the deniers persevere, especially certain elected leaders, as if denial even in the wake of

155 mph winds and a 13-foot storm surge might still confer a political advantage. As if, amid the wreckage of Port St. Joe, Mexico Beach, Panama City, Highland View, St. George Island, Apalachicola, it might not occur to despairing residents that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just might be onto something.