Arkady
President
As you may recall, 2014 was the hottest year on planet Earth since the instrument record began in the late 1800s, joining a string of record highs during the last couple decades. The record was all the more disturbing because it occurred in the absence of an El Nino event, a weather pattern that is usually what drives the globe to new heat records (for example, 1998, which stood as a record for a number of years, was a year with an unusually strong El Nino).
2015 is shaping up to be an El Nino year, and it's been hotter even than 2014. The winter that just ended was the hottest in the history of the instrument record:
http://time.com/3750660/winter-warm-climate-change-noaa/
Things are going to get much worse before they get better. But, we can minimize the damage by moving sooner, rather than later, on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Right-wing nihilists would have you believe that environmentalists are demanding some sort of regression to the stone age, but that's nonsense. It's possible to have extremely high standards of living we sustainable carbon emissions. It just takes an investment in lower-carbon lifestyles -- things like enhanced use of rail travel and mass transit generally, better insulation for homes, energy efficient appliances, a shift of diet away from heavy consumption of beef and towards more vegetables, and more use of low-carbon power generation from things like nuclear and solar, and less from high-carbon options like coal and tar sands.
2015 is shaping up to be an El Nino year, and it's been hotter even than 2014. The winter that just ended was the hottest in the history of the instrument record:
http://time.com/3750660/winter-warm-climate-change-noaa/
Things are going to get much worse before they get better. But, we can minimize the damage by moving sooner, rather than later, on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Right-wing nihilists would have you believe that environmentalists are demanding some sort of regression to the stone age, but that's nonsense. It's possible to have extremely high standards of living we sustainable carbon emissions. It just takes an investment in lower-carbon lifestyles -- things like enhanced use of rail travel and mass transit generally, better insulation for homes, energy efficient appliances, a shift of diet away from heavy consumption of beef and towards more vegetables, and more use of low-carbon power generation from things like nuclear and solar, and less from high-carbon options like coal and tar sands.
