Global Warming

America's first climate change refugees

In March, Louisiana state officials announced that everyone living on Isle de Jean Charles will have to leave. Where there were 22,000 acres in 1955 there are only 320 acres today. They are one hurricane away from obliteration. The evacuation is a test-run for countless coastal communities in Louisiana, who must all move as the seas take over the land.

2 degrees no longer seen as global warming guardrail

Limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius will not prevent destructive and deadly climate impacts, as once hoped, dozens of experts concluded in a score of scientific studies released Monday.

A world that heats up by 2C — long regarded as the temperature ceiling for a climate-safe planet — will see mass displacement due to rising seas, a drop in per capita income, regional shortages of food and fresh water, and the loss of animal and plant species at an accelerated speed.

Poor and emerging countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America will get hit hardest, according to the studies in the British Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A. The countries that show the greatest increase in vulnerability to food insecurity when moving from the present-day climate to 2C global warming are Oman, India, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and Brazil.

With only one degree of warming so far, Earth has seen a crescendo of droughts, heatwaves, and storms ramped up by rising seas. When the planet warms, it takes the ocean hundreds, if not thousands, of years to fully respond.

CO2 emissions — after remaining stable for three years, raising hopes that they had peaked — rose by 1.4 percent in 2017. The 2C goal now already seems unlikely and will soon be out of reach.