Yes, that title is a direct quote from this BBC article online. It’s beyond frightening. The greenhouse gas needle is way past the red dial danger zone. And no one in the media during this election campaign is talking about it. Because, horse races are easier to cover, I guess. Meanwhile planet earth is not waiting around for our media and political elites to take notice of the world of sh*t that we are mucking around in as I write these words.
Measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii went up by more than three parts per million(ppm) in 2015.
Scientists say the spike is due to a combination of human activities and the El Niño weather pattern.
Put another way, this represents an explosion in the growth of CO2 in our atmosphere.
In another first, NOAA found that 2015 was the fourth straight year in which carbon dioxide concentrations grew by more than 2 ppm, according to Pieter Tans, who leads NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.
“Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years,” Tans said in a press release. “It’s explosive compared to natural processes.” […]
According to Tans, the current rate of increase in carbon dioxide levels is 200 times faster than the last time the planet saw such a sustained increase, which was between 17,000 and 11,000 years ago, when there was an 80 ppm increase during that timespan.
Two hundred times faster than the last time there was a sustained rise in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Back then, it took 6000 years for atmospheric CO2 levels to rise 80 parts per million. That works out to .013 ppm a year. Our current rate over the past five years exceeds 2 ppm per year.
Is it any wonder that the hottest year on record was 2015, beating the prior record which occurred in — 2014. Or that of the ten hottest years on record, nine of them occurred since 2003. Yet, no one in the media is talking about this threat to our nation and the world, and certainly little if any attention during the current campaign is being spent on addressing the threat of climate change, not even during the Democratic Party debates.
Leonardo DiCaprio spoke about climate change for a longer amount of time at the Academy Awards than the presidential candidates have in the debates. In the 18 debates held so far, moderators have asked about everything from Super Bowl picks to flower arrangements, while posing only a handful of questions on climate. They ignored it entirely in the December debates, even though the world had just united around the landmark climate agreement in Paris. This must change. […]
People are paying attention. A bipartisan group of 21 Florida mayors, whose constituents are already coping with impacts of climate change, sent a letter to the debate moderators calling on them to ask questions on sea level rise and climate change. The news outlets– Washington Post, Univision and CNN– should follow-through.
I do not care who you support, this is a topic that needs to be brought up at every debate going forward. We know the Republicans are not going to bother, but why are the Democratic debates ignoring climate change? As even the author of The Hill article noted, this must change. Unfortunately, the next scheduled Democratic Party debate is not until April 9th, far too long to wait. I urge you to contact the DNC and your Congressional representatives and demand a separate debate on Climate Change be held at the earliest opportunity.
The DNC Main phone number: 202-863-8000
Twitter accounts: @TheDemocrats, @DWStweets, @BernieSanders, @HillaryClinton
