Yesterday, Nov. 18, 2023, the planet’s temperature went past the 2.0 degree Celsius barrier for the first time. It’s temporary—but it’s a terrible reminder that we’re now in the desperate end game for global warming. And yet no one noticed because—unavoidably—the world’s attention is riveted on the horrors in Gaza. The best reason for a ceasefire there is that the war is a humanitarian disaster; the macabre evil of the Hamas raid on Israel has long since been repaid by the industrial terror of Israel’s response. The proverbial eyes and teeth are attached to altogether too many literal and bloodied bodies. But if you need another reason: on a rapidly heating planet the world cannot afford to have its attention endlessly diverted. We talk about the “ancient” nature of the Mideast conflict, and indeed it’s been contested for several thousand years. But this year saw the hottest temperatures in 125,000 years—which is to say, we’re now experiencing in real time heating that outpaces anything from a very long way before human history. We have almost no time to slow that heating—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we need to cut emissions in half in the next six years to have an outside shot at holding temperatures to anything like a livable level. And that means that we’ve got a duty to move on the things that are preventing action. One, clearly, is the fight over Palestine; it’s never been clearer that these two sides are here to stay, and that some kind of working territorial compromise must be brokered. Even if all you cared about was this one region in the world, you’d want and need to do something about climate change.......because the land here, theoretically so sacred to all sides, is in danger of turning into an uninhabitable desert. At the moment, the region is warming twice as fast as the world as a whole.  Here’s some data (very little of which comes from Israel’s government, because as a detailed report in Haaretz found, the Netanyahu government has ignored the issue as profoundly as it has ignored so much else). Since 1980 the average number of high fire-risk days per year in Israel increased by a factor of 2.5 and very high fire-risk days saw a three-fold increase.In the last three decades, Israel saw a 3.4 percent decline in precipitation; in the coming decades, this is expected to increase to 24 percent less rainfall than the current annual average.  Not surprisingly, the outlook is even grimmer for Gaza. The Turkish news agency AAreportedlast month that an MIT study found that the average annual precipitation in the region will fall 10% to 30% by 2100, temperatures will increase by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius, and it will affect the region's agricultural productivity and food supply, causing price instability and food shortages.  Each day on this earth climate change is the most important thing that happens. But each day these fights stretch on is another day we don’t remember that; another day when, mesmerized by the blood and injustice, we focus instead on the deep, sick attraction of war. It’s impossible to look away; our humanness is defined in part by the short-term fascination with the violent and sad. Human nature has been conditioned by long experience to see the real fights as the ones between humans—that’s what Scripture is about, and history, and drama, with the natural world forming a backdrop. But quite suddenly that backdrop needs to be the foreground; the most essential fight on earth right now is between people and physics.            https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/its-so-hot?utm_campaign=email-post&r=mwxsy&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email