Success at Paris ... would buy us 5 to 10 years in the fight to avoid catastrophe. But we would still be on a path to 675 ppm, which is too high for both the climate change impacts and the direct human cognition impacts. Worse, that level of warming will likely trigger many major carbon-cycle amplifying feedbacks that are not included in the climate models, such as permafrost melting. So we must take stronger action.Not all of you, especially not you, dear reader. That you are even seeing this tells me you are among the brightest minds on the planet. But, Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson are the leading GOP candidates for the Republican nomination for President in 2016, and every single individual who thinks either of those two would not be a fucking disaster as POTUS is objectively, measurably suffering from impaired cognition already.
That we need to be smarter, more sane, less ignorant as a species to understand the science of climate change, and come together to approve of public policy to address the crisis, while our current inaction serves only to make us collectively stupider, is terrifying.
There are reports dense population centers may be too hot for human habitation in my children's lifetime. Check the satellite imagery of Arctic ice melt over the few decades. It's grim stuff.
We are running out of time. We can't afford denialism.
