Climate Pledges Are Falling Short, and a Chaotic Future Looks More Like Reality
By the end of March, there were only 15 months left to prevent the most catastrophic climate change. The Earth can slip into a fourth mass extinction, with species losing half or more of the Earth’s species within 10 years. The world’s oceans could be under five feet of ocean in a year. Earth’s albedo is plummeting, because the planet’s warming has changed the amount of heat-reflecting particles in the atmosphere, turning them into ice.
Even if we succeed in keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the future, as the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015 mandated — assuming every country fulfills its pledged emissions reductions for the agreed periods — we will likely leave the planet with the worst human-caused warming ever since we have measured global temperatures.
The science is clear. The more aggressive the climate action, the more severe the consequences. And the more countries that fail to agree to their fair share, the more likely we are to have a chaotic future.
We’re now in the third year of the Trump administration, and already the administration is cutting climate-change-related programs.
A few days after the U.S. election, Vice President-elect Mike Pence announced the U.S. would exit the Paris Agreement and pull out of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a global agreement meant to keep temperature rises below a warming threshold of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
A few days after the U.S. election, Vice President-elect Mike Pence announced the U.S. would exit the Paris Agreement and withdraw from the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a global agreement meant to keep temperature rises below a warming threshold of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
The decision is part of Donald Trump’s broader plan to withdraw from international agreements. But Trump is not alone. The Paris Agreement has been abrogated by the nations that agreed to it. The Obama
