I'm not here to bash Climate researchers. I'm not a denier or skeptic.

I only wish to point out that, as has occurred in the past, even the best climate models tend to be too cautious in their assumptions. What does that mean? It means the earth is likely to warm faster and reach higher temperatures than many current models predict. Why does this happen? Because the more we learn about all the variables that effect climate, the more we come to know that those factors are far more complex than we imagined. Scientists in this field are by their nature, and thanks to the politicization of the issue, extremely careful about overstating the case for global warming. Unfortunately, when new data is discovered, it often turns out that earlier predictions regarding the rate of warming are less accurate, and the flaw is in underestimating the rapidity of and amount of warming that is most likely to occur

Case in point, this new study published in the respected journal Science (published by the 6 American Association for the Advancement of Science) indicates that current climate models have failed to properly estimate the amount of atmospheric warming likely to occur because they overestimate the cooling effect of clouds, and thus may be underestimating the rate at which warming will occur.

The computer models that predict climate change may be overestimating the cooling power of clouds, new research suggests. If the findings are borne out by further research, it suggests that making progress against global warming will be even harder. [...]

Water droplets reflect more solar radiation back into the sky than ice crystals do. As the atmosphere warms, clouds tend to have more water and less ice in them, and the more watery clouds prevent solar radiation from reaching the earth. Warming is slowed.

With less ice in the mix to start, however, there is less capacity for water to replace ice, said Ivy Tan, an author of the paper and a graduate student at the department of geology and geophysics at Yale University. The result, she said, is more warming.

How much more warming may need to be added to the current models, if this research proves that clouds do not operate to cool the atmosphere as much as previously assumed? Well, the study came up with a figure of 1.3 degrees Celsius more, or an increase of roughly 2.34 degrees Fahrenheit, assuming that this research is duplicated. Nonetheless, many scientists are already acknowledging that because of this flaw in past models, newer models will have to be adjusted to account for this increase. As one researcher put it: "The point is, it’s going to result in a significant amount of warming.” What she means is a significant amount more than is already projected to occur.

As it stands now, some current models are predicting a rise of up to 3 degrees Celcius by 2050, which is far in excess of the recent target of "keeping temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over average temperatures in the preindustrial era" established under the Paris agreement last year. We are only 34 years away from 2050. I don't expect to live that long, but my children likely will. And a three degree rise in the global mean temperature will result in catastrophic impacts on human civilization.

A world 3 C warmer would see a significant drop in food production, an increase in urban heat waves akin to the one that killed thousands of people this year in India, and more droughts and wildfires, according to Ray Pierrehumbert, a physics professor at the University of Oxford. [...]

A warmer world would also potentially lead to more refugees, he said, pointing to the refugee crisis currently unfolding in Europe.

“When talking about climate refugees ... [t]he scale of climate migration could dwarf anything we’ve seen,” Pierrehumbert said. Many areas of the densely populated and mostly low-lying country could become uninhabitable within a century if warming continues, he added. [...]

Jason Funk, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said a temperature increase of 3 C would seriously disrupt global economic systems and many people’s livelihoods.

“It could potentially lead to more conflicts because resources will be impacted, and people will be trying to capture access to those resources,” Funk said. “It’s not a pleasant scenario.”

Not a pleasant scenario is an understatement. Here is a more pessimistic view of what we could be facing not by the end of this century, but in less than forty years, assuming we make no headway on changing the status quo regarding greenhouse gas emissions and other variables that will multiply the effects that will flow from the increases in green house gases on our oceans and our atmosphere:

Beyond two degrees ... preventing mass starvation will be as easy as halting the cycles of the moon. First millions, then billions, of people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive.

A three-degree increase in global temperature – possible as early as 2050 – would throw the carbon cycle into reverse. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, vegetation and soils start to release it. So much carbon pours into the atmosphere that it pumps up atmospheric concentrations by 250 parts per million by 2100, boosting global warming by another 1.5C.

With new “super-hurricanes” growing from the warming sea, Houston could be destroyed by 2045, and Australia will be a death trap. “Farming and food production will tip into irreversible decline. Salt water will creep up the stricken rivers, poisoning ground water. Higher temperatures mean greater evaporation, further drying out vegetation and soils, and causing huge losses from reservoirs. In state capitals, heat every year is likely to kill between 8,000 and 15,000 mainly elderly people.

It is all too easy to visualise what will happen in Africa. In Central America, too, tens of millions will have little to put on their tables. Even a moderate drought there in 2001 meant hundreds of thousands had to rely on food aid. This won’t be an option when world supplies are stretched to breaking point (grain yields decline by 10% for every degree of heat above 30C, and at 40C they are zero). Nobody need look to the US, which will have problems of its own. As the mountains lose their snow, so cities and farms in the west will lose their water and dried-out forests and grasslands will perish at the first spark.

In short, prepare for something on the scale of a Mad Max doomsday scenario for much of the planet.

Experts agree that if the onslaught of climate change continues unabated, water will be a highly-prized commodity. “The twenty-first-century projections make the [previous] mega-droughts seem like quaint walks through the garden of Eden,” says Jason Smerdon, a Columbia University climate scientist.

Still, we don’t have to project into the future to see the impact of climate change on our water supply. “[I]t doesn't really require much exposition for the audience to buy a degraded world, because we already see evidence of it happening all around us,” Miller said. He’s right, and evidence can be seen all around the globe. Obama noted in his speech Wednesday that “severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram.” Meanwhile, California is in the midst of a four-year mega-drought that has led the state to try out rationing policies, and officials in Sao Paolo, Brazil are scrambling to come up with a solution to the city’s water crisis that may leave the city absolutely dry in just a few months. As policy experts work to come up with a solution, city officials are bracing for riots due to unrest. Conflict between states is also a distinct possibility, as many national security experts have predicted an era of “water wars.”

Puts the whole stupid election mudslinging into perspective, doesn't it? It also shows us that we do need a movement that will last long beyond a single election cycle. The world is poised on the brink of food shortages, wars, refugees, plagues, droughts, floods, extreme storms and heat waves the likes of which humanity has never seen before, and it's coming at us faster than a speeding bullet. The current political powers structures in place in much of the world, and certainly here in the United States, are designed to willfully ignore this threat, because they are in thrall to large multi-national corporations that make commodities of human beings.

And those corporations are owned and controlled by a very few individuals who have accumulated wealth at a rate, in in amounts, so massive that to properly convey in a single blog post is impossible. Unfortunately, we know that the richer one becomes, the lower one's feeling of compassion and empathy for others. The welfare of other human beings, much less the survival of the humanity doesn't consume them much, if they think of these matters at all.

What the Sanders' campaign has shown us, if anything, is that any real hope fo changing society so that it focuses on these existential challenges must, and likely only can come from below, from people like you and me. The top of the economic food chain has no interest in seeing these disasters averted. If anything, many of them will no doubt profit mightily from exploiting the crises that are bound to come our way. In short, they have no incentive to address climate change because all they care about is their current stock portfolio, and how to squeeze more money out of the lower classes. Their attitude is exemplified in George W. Bush's famous statement when asked how he thought history would view him. Here's his revealing answer for those for you who don't remember it:

“History,” he replied. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

I like to believe that my life means more than a meaningless journey over a brief span of time. I like to believe that what I and others like me do today, will matter for the future of individuals I will never know, but for whom I feel great compassion and love. Call it a spiritual attitude, if you like, but I believe we all have some purpose for existing in this universe, and our purpose now, in this moment of time, is to wrest control away from the hands of those few misguided or outright evil people who would not care to stop the death and destruction and misery of billions of human beings simply because that suffering, in the present and which will result in the future, benefits them now.

I hope you agree with at least some of what I have said, because folks, we have a lot of work ahead of us, regardless of the outcome of this year's political election cycle. Necessary work. Difficult work. For some, work that will prove dangerous and perhaps fatal. But work we cannot avoid, and should not evade.

Thank you for your time.