Remember the good old days when climate change was something that would occur a century or more in the future? Something we could avoid if we played our cards right?
As the years rolled by, the time between us and that faraway future bedeviling our great-grandchildren first shortened and then disappeared. In an April 2015 studypublished in Nature, climate scientists wrote that:
The large shift over the coming decades … indicates that the world is now entering a regime where … impacts related to rates of change will intensify over the coming decades. … [and be] … sustained for some decades even under substantial emission mitigation efforts …
The scientists call this shift “unprecedented.” Unprecedented like rising highs in temperaturesfor the last several years. Unprecedented like the recent flooding in Louisiana.