Climate Change: The Canary is Dead in the Coal Mine

February was the warmest month in all of recorded history, breaking a record set just two months prior, in December of 2015. If that isn’t bad enough, 2015 was the warmest year ever recorded, and by a rather large margin. From pole to pole and sea to shining sea, the Earth is getting much warmer and at a faster pace than had long been predicted. With the extreme warming has also come ever harder to ignore results that should be rousing us into action, yet we're doing relatively little to stave off catastrophe.

This year’s El Nino, a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean in its tropical regions, has also been historic and climate scientists are predicting that it will continue for several months. It’s caused droughts in Africa and floods in South America, destroying so many crops in both places that almost 100 million people are currently facing food and water shortages as a result.

In Chile, an immense toxic algal bloom killed more than 20 million salmon, the corpses of which went on to pollute the waters, as fisherman worked around the clock to remove more than 38 tons of dead fish from the coastal waters last week, costing the industry nearly a billion dollars. Scientists say the bloom resulted from the much warmer coastal waters, which also caused phytoplankton to die off, starting a chain reaction that rang through several levels of feeder fish and ultimately made its way up the food chain, where hundreds of dead baby sea lions washed up on the country’s shores after starving to death.

February’s average global temperature rose more than two degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average for the month. The marker of a permanent two degree warming has long been a threshold used by scientists because of the impact it would have on ice sheet melting and sea level rise. We won’t know for some time whether February was an aberration or the beginning of a norm, but the data suggests the latter.

We have also recently discovered that arctic ice sheets are melting faster than predicted and are also more sensitive to carbon dioxide than previously thought. If ice sheets and glaciers melt faster, that not only contributes to rising sea levels but threatens the ocean’s conveyor belt which circulates water throughout the globe and has a profound impact on temperatures. The melting of glaciers and sea ice causing an influx of warm freshwater onto the sea surface could block the formation of sea ice, disrupting the sinking of cold, salty water, and further altering temperatures in an even more drastic way. As tropical regions warm, the range of mosquitoes increases as do the tropical diseases they carry, as evidenced in a northward creep of malaria and more recently, with the rapid spread of the zika virus.

Sounds pretty bad, eh? If it were a movie, heads of state would likely be meeting from all over the world to discuss a historical plan to save humanity. If it were a Hollywood movie, there would likely be an American President taking the leadership role and we would mobilize a large enough response to save the day, if not before a few catastrophes gave the director a chance to show a couple of really cool CGI effects of giant tidal waves rolling over iconic American landmarks.

Only it’s not a movie, and when world leaders met in Paris at the end of 2015 for what were supposed to be historic accords on strategies to combat climate change, they agreed upon little, ultimately walking away with a weak and unenforceable plan to take steps that climate scientists universally hailed as too little, too late. With another presidential election looming, none of that seems likely to change, despite the increasing body of evidence that it must.

On one hand there is the Republican field, which has come around from the party that used to deny the science of climate change to one that now acknowledges the obvious but then claims that there is nothing that the U.S. can do about it and that even trying to would have too many negative economic impacts to be worth it.

Believe it or not, Republicans used to have a pretty good record on environmental issues. Going back to Teddy Roosevelt, Republicans were among the foremost advocates of government intervention for environmental protection.This pretty much continued through President Nixon, who has perhaps the best environmental record of all modern-era presidents, including the creation of the EPA (by executive order), along with the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. That all changed, however, when Ronald Reagan made his first act as President the removal of the White House's solar panels and went on an eight-year spree of gutting environmental regulations, kicking off an era in which any form of policy aimed at protecting environmental resources became anathema to Republican political ideology.

President George W. Bush picked up where Reagan left off (his father, George H.W. Bush actually had several environmental bright spots, including controls on CFCs and strengthening federal protections of wetlands). W’s war on the environment started immediately when he broke a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants–the single biggest contributor to global warming. It continued through his withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol and the administration’s pressure on the EPA to censor evidence of global warming’s effects and a failed effort to gut Nixon’s Clean Air Act, via his much-lampooned and Orwellian-named Clear Skies Initiative.

Democrats became the default party of environmentalists under Reagan and have never really lost the mantle, but to show you how large the shift has been, President Obama’s environmental record is nowhere near as green as President Nixon’s. Furthermore, much of the President’s positive actions have been reversals that came following massive protests, as was the case in the Keystone XL pipeline and his recent reversal on expanding oil drilling in the Atlantic Ocean.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s environmental policies aren’t any more progressive than Obama’s, as evidenced by her similar flip-flop on the Keystone issue. In fact, the only candidate in the entire field for both parties who has made a serious platform issue of climate change is Bernie Sanders, who is trailing Clinton and has been largely written off by his own party, quite probably because he is off-script with the party establishment on so many issues.

So, how are we going to reverse a disastrous, fast-moving and ultimately apocalyptic trend when, in most ways, we’re less serious about it today than we were 40 years ago? The unfortunate answer is that we’re probably not going to. It seems like climate change is a reality our leaders have accepted and plan only to attempt to manage each catastrophe on a case-by-case basis. Either that, or they are still under the delusion that we can continue to wait until we approach the cliff and rely on science to find a last-minute miracle cure that will suddenly put the brakes on it.