Today in Global Warming

A new study is out showing that climate change could render much of the world physically uninhabitable:

“We found that … a 21-degree warming would put half of the world’s population in an uninhabitable environment,”says study co-author Matthew Huber of Purdue University.

Unless, of course, we do even better than that and wipe out the entire planet.

But two U.S. scientists think they’ve got an escape hatch for us. Veerabhadran Ramanathan and Yangyang Xu of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego think we can avoid cresting the catastrophic 3.6-degree warming threshold with a climate hat trick: balancing aerosols and CO2 emissions while immediately reducing short-term greenhouse gases.

In other science news, watch out for flying acid-filled beakers. American scientists are tired of the bullshit, and they aren’t gonna take it anymore.

“We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. We call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action and the outright lies being spread about them.”

Inhofe = McCarthy. Gosh, I never would have thought of that.

So how do we get people to pay attention to the real threats of global warming? Deepa Gupta, co-founder of the Indian Youth Climate Network, writes on Treehugger.com that, in order to get people to care about global warming, we need to engage them personally:

“I’ve had so many people say that they’ve never really cared about the issue or became confused and disengaged from it – until I spent the time to talk to them personally or in a group about it. Personal interaction is critical. All the big social movements in history have been through people personally connecting with each other.”

I know I’m hesitant to talk about global warming, what with all the rabid deniers out there. How about you?