Sheldon Whitehouse: “I am back again with the old battered ``Time to Wake Up'' graphic here. The Smithsonian can't have it quite yet. This…”

“I am back again with the old battered ``Time to Wake Up'' graphic here. The Smithsonian can't have it quite yet. This ``Time to Wake Up'' climate report starts with the unfortunate proposition that we are in terrible danger on climate. Obviously, a critical part and an essential explanation of the danger is that the Republican Party has been turned, by fossil fuel industry dark money, into little more than the political wing of the fossil fuel industry, slavishly dependent on the fossil fuel polluters to fill up its super PACs and shameless about parroting the polluters' obnoxious lies. But all that happens in the political world; where the danger gets real is in the physical world. And a recent study suggests that we have, perhaps, already blown through the 1.5 degrees of world heating safety limit. That 1.5-degree limit was always just an estimated upper bound. Unlike many estimates, it could have been too high. It could be that the true safety barrier was always below 1.5 degrees. But in any event, assume that it actually is 1.5 degrees, which is sort of the midpoint of the estimates. Well, it is starting to look like we may be losing even against that metric. Here is a chart that summarizes over a thousand different projections that have been done from different sources as to where our CO<INF>2</INF> emissions are going to take us. It is actually more than 1,200 different scenarios.…”