3 Terrifying Things About the Earth We're in Denial About

At this point, it’s hard even to imagine what a planet that's 3.6 degrees C hotter would be like, though some climate-change scholars and prophets -- like former Vice President Al Gore in  An Inconvenient Truth  -- have tried.  In all likelihood, the  Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets would melt entirely, raising sea levels by several dozen feet and completely inundating coastal cities like New York and Shanghai.  Large parts of Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the American Southwest would be rendered uninhabitable thanks to  lack of water  and desertification, while  wildfires of a sort that we can’t imagine today would consume the parched forests of the temperate latitudes.

In a report that leads with the “good news” of impending U.S. oil supremacy, to calmly suggest that the world is headed for that 3.6 degree C mark is like placing a thermonuclear bomb in a gaudily-wrapped Christmas present.  In fact, the “good news” is really the bad news: the energy industry’s ability to boost production of oil, coal, and natural gas in North America is feeding a global surge in demand for these commodities, ensuring ever higher levels of carbon emissions.  As long as these trends persist -- and the IEA report provides no evidence that they will be reversed in the coming years -- we are all in a race to see who gets to the Apocalypse first.