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Thursday, July 11th, 2019

It’s the End of the World as They Know It

Author:     DAVID CORN
Source:     Mother Jones
Publication Date:     JULY 8, 2019
 Link: It’s the End of the World as They Know It
Stephan:   Day after day I keep waiting for a Republican in the Congress, or a cabinet officer, to put forward a fully thought out and articulated vision of how to deal with climate change. An alternative to what AOC, Sanders, Inslee, or Warren are proposing. We know it won't come from Trump who says he doesn't believe in climate change, although he has started to gaslight the country about how he is doing everything in his power to produce, "clean air, pure water." Meanwhile, for the community of climatologists, geologists, marine biologists, arctic specialists, and other scientists, the men and women who study climate change every day, and who command the facts, their sense of urgency grows exponentially. Here is one take on that.

Credit: Devin Yalkin

On election night 2016, Kim Cobb, a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, was on Christmas Island, the world’s largest ring-shaped coral reef atoll, about 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. A climate scientist, she was collecting coral skeletons to produce estimates of past ocean temperatures. She had been taking these sorts of research trips for two decades, and over recent years she had witnessed about 85 percent of the island’s reef system perish due to rising ocean temperatures. “I was diving with tears in my eyes,” she recalls.

In a row house made of cinder blocks on the tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she monitored the American election results, using a satellite uplink that took several minutes to load a page. When she saw Donald Trump’s victory, she felt shock and soon descended into severe depression. “I had the firm belief that Washington would act on climate change and would be acting soon,” the […]

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