Not Cool

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“No sweat,” this well-groomed model must be thinking, “I’m used to working under hot lights.” For the rest of us, however, things aren’t looking too cool. Despite the oil, gas, and coal industries’ “Tobacco Institute Strategy” of pretending there’s great scientific uncertainty, almost all climate scientists are convinced that industrial carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and other greenhouse gases are trapping ever greater amounts of heat in our atmosphere.

In just the past hundred years of industrialization, the CO2 content of our atmosphere has climbed by more than a third, so that today there’s more CO2 in our air than at any time in the past 160,000 years. Partly as a result, average world temperatures have risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit in this century, and are projected to rise another 2 to 6 degrees in the next century. The geological record suggests that changes like these can have dramatic impacts on rainfall, storm size and duration, glaciers, droughts, the rising sea level, the spread of tropical diseases, and the survival of threatened species. Already the last 15 years have been the warmest of the past 200 years, and the 4 hottest years on record all occurred in the 1990s. The 1980s were the hottest decade on record — and the 1990s are well on the way to breaking that record.

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No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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