Trump's Bungling of Coronavirus Response Mirrors His Approach to Climate Crisis
"This report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it." That is the statement of Brian Hoskins, chair of Imperial College in London's Grantham Institute for Climate Change, about the recently released State of the Climate in 2019 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the WMO compiles information from scientists all over the world that has been a key driver of international climate law and policymaking. One of the IPCC's reports was similarly dire to that of the WMO's, but not without hope.
Although anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have disrupted the planet's climate system in ways that have already caused and will continue to cause massive harms all over the world, the IPCC warned, we still have time to prevent a level of disruption that would render the planet uninhabitable for humans and most other species that we share it with. The IPCC gave policymakers a roadmap for how to achieve that: do not allow warming of the Earth to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which in turn requires us to achieve global net zero …
