Bright, way-clear sunshine tempered by a chilly breeze this late afternoon Thursday in California’s Central Valley — finally a distinct autumn day.
Summer this year has been a bitch — our hottest ever — and it looked like it would never end.

Ending quickly, too, could be our environment, not only for my location but for the whole, fucking-freaking world. Climate change is the knotted hole coming to get us, and most-likely the most important clusterfuck ever, and most-serious stake riding on this election — T-Rump wins you can bet not-much human/animal flesh can be eventually/ultimately saved.
Today another screaming red-fag warning — of the shitload been broadcast for decades — this one from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), entitled “Emissions Gap Report 2024,” which investigates the gap in our getting a handle on the climate crisis.
In a few words, really, really seriously important (from the report): ‘The future of our planet is at stake. We are in the midst of a climate emergency, and the window to act is closing fast.’

The report is a hard message prior to the 29th installment of the UN’s Climate Change conference — COP29 — to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan next month.

Global advocate for climate and social justice Harjeet Singh calls it: ‘“World leaders continue to drag their feet, protecting the interests of the fossil fuel industry, while people are suffering right now. At Cop29, leaders must respond and act on their fair share of responsibility – especially wealthier nations who have fuelled this crisis for decades.”‘

Time has come:

New UNEP emissions gap report highlights a "massive gap between rhetoric and reality" and calls for a "quantum leap" in ambition to deliver Paris goals, as the world is way off-track today.

I cover the details over at @CarbonBrief: https://t.co/PKae14c066 pic.twitter.com/aCyYmbKlOx

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) October 24, 2024

Details via noted climate scientist and energy systems analyst Zeke Hausfather at CarbonBrief this morning — the reality is shitty:

The report warns that both progress and ambition have “plateaued” in recent years, with relatively little of substance occurring since the pledges made at COP26 in 2021. And many countries are not even on track to meet their existing NDCs, with current policy projections from G20 nations exceeding NDC commitments by a collective 1bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalent, CO2e) in 2030.

Current policies put the world on track for 2.9C of warming by 2100, the report finds – though this could be reduced to 2.4-2.6C, if all existing NDCs are met.

But unless global emissions in 2030 are brought below the levels implied by current NDCs, a pathway to 1.5C with no or limited overshoot becomes “impossible”, the report says, and “strongly” increases the challenge of limiting warming to 2C.

While the magnitude of the challenge is “indisputable”, there are “abundant opportunities for accelerating mitigation”, the report says. It finds that global emissions could be cut by 54% by 2030 and 72% by 2035 at a cost of less than $200 per tonne of CO2.

This indicates that the gap between commitments and current policies is a result of a lack of policy support rather than more fundamental barriers to decarbonisation.

[…]

The UNEP report finds that human emissions of greenhouse gases – CO2, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases (F-gases) – reached a record 57.1bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e) in 2023.

[…]

The primary focus of this edition of the report is tracking the gap between where the world is heading today – both under current policies and near-term commitments – and what would be needed to meet Paris Agreement goals of limit warming to well-below 2C.

However, since the 2023 report, there have not been any notable changes in country pledges or policies – and global emissions continued to grow.

This means that the emissions gap is wider than it was last year and the world is further off track from its climate goals.

Concluding: Ultimately, the report highlights that the growing emissions gap reflects a lack of political will by countries to address emissions, rather than any fundamental constraint on the world’s ability to rapidly mitigate.

Duh! Hence, the extra-added horror of the T-Rump.

Video of the report per Reuters:

Further despair from The New York Times, also this morning:

Over the past year, only the island nation of Madagascar has submitted a new, stronger pledge to curb emissions by 2030, despite exhortations by United Nations officials for all countries to bolster their plans. And with each year that goes by without additional action, the cuts needed to hold warming to those low levels become more and more extreme.

“Theoretically, it’s still possible to stay below 1.5 degrees, but it’s not really feasible anymore,” said Christoph Bertram, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability.

Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said it was still important for nations to accelerate their efforts to cut emissions and keep warming as low as possible.

“Even if the world overshoots 1.5 degrees Celsius, and the chances of this happening are increasing every day, we must keep striving” to bring emissions down to zero as soon as possible, Ms. Andersen said. “Every fraction of a degree avoided counts in terms of lives saved, economies protected, damages avoided, biodiversity conserved.”

Despite the subject of climate change has been a national topic for 50 years, I wasn’t personally aware until 2007 — a year of the UN assessment naming humans as fossil-fuel burning instigators of climate change for the first time, and I’ve seen/read of several red-flag warnings since then, and there’s been near-about nothing.
I can’t emphasize enough that climate change should be the entire world’s main focal point. However, there are too many T-Rumps denying the environment is going to shit in a wire basket, and will allow/push for the end of all our shits.

Reality and not CGI (disclaimer — I can’t help playing the clip a whole shitload lot):

In spite of the real-time catastrophically-destructive Florida hurricanes, or not, yet once again here we are…

(Illustration out front from the UN’s International Children’s Painting Competition, and found here.)