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Yves here. Even though Trump is making headway on his project to reduce living standards in the US to the level of the 1890s, one area where he is coming up short is on climate change. A general rise in temperature levels and more and more wild weather is defying his desire to return to the past.<\/p>\n
Since the early 2000s, the Pentagon has been briefed on what even then were depicted as inevitable climate-changed induced mass migrations, which would be enormously destabilizing. So the story line that major population movements are inevitable is not news. However, citizens in high income countries have a weird way of thinking they are not much exposed.<\/p>\n
This article gives a needed, if sobering, update, that surpassing the temperature rise target of 1.5\u00b0C would produce seriously bad outcomes, and even merely holding at the current 1.2\u00b0C increase level will produce enough in the way of sea level rises to generate large-scale migration and population displacement.<\/p>\n
By Jessica Corbett, a staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n With governments \u201cscaling back their already meager\u201d actions to tackle climate breakdown, said one ecologist, \u201cour present-day human culture is on a suicide course.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Less than six months away from the next United Nations summit<\/a> for parties to the Paris climate agreement, scientists on Tuesday released a study showing that even meeting the deal\u2019s 1.5\u00b0C temperature target could lead to significant sea-level rise that drives seriously disruptive migration inland.<\/p>\n Governments that signed on to the 2015 treaty aim to take action to limit global temperature rise by 2100 to 1.5\u00b0C beyond preindustrial levels. Last year was not only the hottest<\/a> in human history but also the first<\/a> in which the average global temperature exceeded 1.5\u00b0C. Multiple studies have warned<\/a> of major impacts from even temporarily overshooting the target, bolstering demands for policymakers to dramatically rein in planet-heating fossil fuels.<\/p>\n The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment<\/em>warns<\/a> that 1.5\u00b0C \u201cis too high\u201d and even the current 1.2\u00b0C, \u201cif sustained, is likely to generate several meters of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and challenging the implementation of adaptation measures.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTo avoid this requires a global mean temperature that is cooler than present and which we hypothesize to be closer to +1\u00b0C above preindustrial, possibly even lower, but further work is urgently required to more precisely determine a \u2018safe limit\u2019 for ice sheets,\u201d the paper states, referring to Antarctica and Greenland\u2019s continental glaciers.<\/p>\n