OnlySky, Adam Lee, today: Cutting off the tail of climate change, subtitled “We’ve avoided the worst-case scenario.”
Here’s the best news you’ll read this year: RCP8.5 is dead.
This concerns the recent revision to the climate change model that simpletons (like Trump) think means that scientists don’t know what they’re doing and that climate change is a hoax. Rather, as Lee explains, this is good news: we’ve actually *done something* to reduce the possibility of that worst-case scenario. Not enough to solve the entire problem, but a little bit.
If you don’t know what that means or why it’s such good news, that’s understandable. But that bland, technical acronym concealed an apocalyptic scenario for humanity. The fact that it’s no longer a future we need to fear is something the whole world should be celebrating.
Lee then goes into details the various climate change scenarios and what the worst one would mean.
If you don’t know what that means or why it’s such good news, that’s understandable. But that bland, technical acronym concealed an apocalyptic scenario for humanity. The fact that it’s no longer a future we need to fear is something the whole world should be celebrating.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), you don’t need to use your imagination. Climate scientists have sketched a picture.
In a world with 4°C of warming, 4.7 billion people would be exposed to potentially lethal levels of heat over the course of the year. Summer temperatures in equatorial regions like the Middle East and North Africa could reach 60°C (140°F) on the hottest days. Southern Spain would become a desert. Cities like Karachi and Kolkata would become uninhabitable. As journalist David Wallace-Wells put it in a famous article: “At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.”
Unfortunately climate-change deniers and vested interests have by now made it impossible to meet the best-case scenario. Lee concludes,
Obviously, this is bad for the world. While 2°C of warming isn’t as apocalyptic as 4° would be, it’s still going to create widespread disruption to civilization: coastal flooding, inland drought, more frequent and dangerous heat waves, shifting weather patterns disrupting agriculture, resource shortages and migrations.
At present, there’s no plausible future scenario that avoids this. But everything we can do to speed the green transition will make the future less bad than it would otherwise have been. We’ve steered away from the worst case, but that’s no reason to declare victory. Now we need to see if we can cut off the next worst scenario that’s still possible.
There’s a general misunderstanding among many, many conservatives at least, that science claims some kind of ultimate truth, and so when science “changes its mind” or revises its conclusions, it must be flawed and unreliable. This is wrong. The impression presumably derives from how conservatives cling to religion, which does in fact claim some kind of ultimate truth. Which never changes. (Well, except maybe when the infallible Pope discovers that the teachings of the Church should now be different than they’d been before.)
Science is a gradual process of discovery. It’s a process to arrive at successively close iteration to a kind of ideal truth, one which we may never reach. That doesn’t mean some scientific conclusions aren’t so well established that, unless you have motivation to disbelieve them (because religion), it would be foolish to doubt them. These include the atomic theory of matter, evolution, continental drift, and climate change. And the shape of the Earth. All the loony arguments on Facebook trying to support creationism or the flat earth aren’t really about evidence. They’re trying to shore up religious or intuitive understandings of the world.
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— Looking Down —
Unfortunately, there’s much more news like this every day:
The Bulwark, Catherine Rampell, yesterday: Trump Just Gutted A Major Line of Oceanic Defense, subtitled “Just in time for hurricane season, the Trump administration is defunding its global ocean-monitoring system.”
This has been mentioned before.
IF YOU’VE WATCHED ANY hurricane coverage on TV in the past few years, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a house here fall into the ocean.
It’s happened thirty-two times in this wispy strip of barrier islands, known as the Outer Banks, since 2020. And not just during hurricanes! The most recent house collapse happened just last week, amid a relatively minor coastal storm. That little blue Buxton house was devoured by the sea in less than half an hour. Once-pristine “oceanfront” property is now just ocean.
Buxton and other towns around the Outer Banks have become the national poster children for the dangers of rising sea levels, coastal erosion, and intensifying storms linked to climate change. But last month, just in time for hurricane season and an intense El Niño event, the Trump administration announced it would strip the coastline of one of its most important lines of defense: the Ocean Observatories Initiative.
The OOI system is being defunded, and its sprawling array of deep-sea monitoring devices will soon start getting pulled out of the water. The loss of this and other data-collection infrastructure could well be existential for the tourism-dependent Outer Banks economy. But like other Trump administration efforts to dismantle federal scientific and statistical programs, it’s pretty problematic for the rest of us, too.
Later:
SO WHY IS THIS SYSTEM being dismantled?
The National Science Foundation’s official explanation for the “descoping” is that it is bringing the OOI into alignment with the research-funding agency’s larger strategy: “a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.” Whatever that means.
Apparently this “nimbler approach” includes a sweeping effort to delete, defund, or otherwise censor inconvenient data and scientific wrongthink4; purge Ph.D.s from government payrolls; and subject research grants to ideological purity tests.
Because climate change doesn’t exist and/or trying to stop it is “woke.” That’s Trump and MAGA for you.
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Short Items
- JMG, today: USDA Says Screwworm Cases Have Risen To Nine
- Because DOGE, perhaps. From Newsmax: “A government agency spending $300 million in taxpayer dollars to produce sterilized flies sounds like a dream scenario for a DOGE team looking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.”
- What is it people admired about Charlie Kirk, exactly?
- Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: TPUSA’s new message to girls: Hate yourself, subtitled “Speakers at the women’s leadership summit continued Charlie Kirk’s misogynist mission”
- I think these are related.
- Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 10 Jun 2026: ‘Absolutely Beautiful’: FlashPoint MAGA Cultists Praise Trump For Storming Out Of Interview
- A reporter who asks Trumps for any evidence at all of his claims is their enemy? Note this: “She’s just generally rude. Her parents obviously raised her incorrectly. She was not raised in the church.” Because being raised in the church means…?
- Ring Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday: Why David Barton’s Disregard For Truth Matters
- As long documented. MAGA and evangelical Christianity aren’t about evidence or reason or truth.
- JMG, today, (from Military Times): Pentagon Cancels Wreath-Laying For Female Veterans
- Of course they did. Because acknowledging women would be DEI, and that’s now forbidden.
- JMG, 10 Jun (from New Republic): DOJ Prosecutor Bill Essayli Invites Cult To Crowdsource Proof Of “Voter Fraud” In California’s Elections
- Sure, go ahead. The only evidence they’ll find is what they manufacture.
Abbreviated post today. Got called away for a dinner with in-laws.
