30% of our CO2 emissions have been absorbed by the and imperil marine life
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how grave, some believe the IPCC’s forecasts actually would have an effect on the behavior of the capitalist class and its politicians, who together hold the power of life and death over the rest of us. Based on the ex perience of the last quarter century, they are undoubt edly unwilling to lift a finger to mitigate and adapt to runaway climate change, and instead have been active ly and consistently blocking any efforts to do so. The real question is whether or not the world’s masses will feel moved to rise up and demand fundamental change based on what the IPCC reports.
Over the next year, more of the 4000-page document will be released, with further details and impacts. This is to be followed by another UN climate conference in Paris in 2015, where the extremely hopeful are expect ing an agreement among world leaders to be finalized. Given their history, we have our doubts.
A warming pause?
A big issue that was debated hotly before the release of the report was the so-called warming slowdown that has supposedly occurred over the past 15 years de spite the continuous rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Industry-funded professional climate-change deniers, trying to cast doubt on the science, had been harping about it for some time. Of course, they gained attention because the media dutifully reports every inane utter ance coming out of the skeptics’ mouths, giving the vo cal minority equal time on every occasion in the phony name of objectivity, regardless of the truth.
As some defenders of climate science have pointed out, the blip in the meteorological data is really just a statistical mirage that reflects random fluctuations. Al though the rate of warming between 1998 and 2012 was half the average rate since 1951 (0.05 C compared with 0.12 C per decade), the globe is still heating.
Using 1998 as the starting point, makes the tem perature graph look flatter than it would appear if one began with records from the turn of the century. That particular year, 1998, was the third-hottest on record,