Global Warming in Vogue, Deal With It!

Global Warming (“GW”) is winning, and it is gaining. Obstacles to hotter temperatures are falling to the wayside, allowing GW to go for more intense heatwaves along with much, much higher sea levels. Alas, the greenest of green countries are turning tail and de-emphasizing commitments to fight climate change. Several of the 196 countries subject to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) at the Paris Agreement (2015) are behaving like they’re “okay with global warming”. Trump’s smiling.

According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO): “Extreme Heat is Breaking Records Worldwide.” (UN News August 7, 2025). But this current trend of killer heatwaves is likely only an early preview of much more to come.

Greta Thunberg’s “Sweden is falling back from its environmental progress. Last year, its fossil fuel emissions saw their biggest increase in 15 years.” (Sweden, an Early Climate Leader, is Retreating from Its Environmental Commitments, Part of an EU Trend, Inside Climate News, August 3, 2025).

Indeed, part of the reason for Sweden’s increasing emissions is global warming’s inexorable drought sequences and clearcutting and wildfires destroying forests, thus reducing carbon uptake, measurably, cut in half. Fifteen years ago, Sweden’s 87 billion trees, soils and wetlands stored almost 62 million tons of carbon each year, which was more than the country’s total fossil fuel emissions. In 2024, it fell by half to 31 million tons. Such a steep drop indicates increased clearcutting and years of severe drought, due to severe global warming, with wildfires, beetle infections and weak soil nutrition.

Additionally, Sweden’s political swing to the right has slashed investments in climate actionable projects. “Researchers say Sweden’s policy shifts, and its evolving role as a frontrunner indeed is now contributing to the weakening of Europe’s climate agenda,” Ibid.

Sweden’s EPA claims it will miss all national climate targets for the next 20 years.

The EU’s trumpeted “Green Sextet” nations driving climate action for the EU in a positive direction is collapsing. Five of the six nations are reducing their climate policy objectives: “Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, and Austria — all appear to reduce their climate policy objectives. All of these countries have also shifted to the political right. Only Denmark, a leader in offshore wind, is mostly maintaining its aspirations to cut emissions and fight climate change.” Funding for climate action is plummeting. (Sweden, Once A Climate Action Leader, Now Lags Behind Its Peers in Europe, CleanTechnica, August 4, 2025).

Right wing populist policy wonks favor global warming over diminishment of carbon emissions’ fossil fuels. This counterintuitive policy behavior is concurrent with a sudden uplift of global temperatures circa 2023-24 with a jaw-dropping surprising 0.30°C increase, sustaining 1.5C above preindustrial for the full year. Climate scientists were, and still are, shocked as global warming took a 10-fold jump, in only one year: Egads! Climate normalizing hasn’t occurred to reduce this shocking uplift, meaning the climate system is adopting a new higher plateau for successive excessive heatwaves. This is bad, bad news… period!

Since the general elections in 2022 in Sweden, a conservative coalition, headed by the far-right Sweden Democrats, have focused on promoting cheaper fossil fuels (increasing subsidies) and public safety and of course (it goes without saying) anti-immigrant policies, while halting investment in high-speed rail, cancellation of subsidies for electric vehicles, increasing taxes on solar electricity, and cutting investments in green innovation funds. Along the way, Sweden’s carbon emissions rose by 7% last year.

Overall, it appears the EU may be tossing in the towel on climate change mitigation policies, like US policy under its ultra-right-wing fascists-inspired administration. They bathe in hot weather, the hotter, the better, but nobody explains why in plain language. Whispers, insider scoops, say they overconfidently believe that technology will bail us out of a global warming disaster, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Sorrowfully, carbon capture is ridiculously immature and as weak as a peashooter and nuclear (iffy) has issues beyond the scope of this short article, none meeting the timelines of a climate system just starting to run hot, and hotter. The best shot, based upon actual events, is renewables across the board worldwide, replacing fossil fuels. But is there enough time?

Global Heat Outlook to 2029

According to the WMO, average global mean temperatures between 2025 and 2029 could average up to 1.9°C higher than preindustrial. That’ll be one more ridiculously hard to believe plateau higher than the 2023 uplift to 1.5°C. In other words, if extreme heat levels are breaking all-time world records this year in 2025, records will be crushed in following years, guaranteeing new record higher sea levels (ouch! Miami Beach) and enhancing the record of +60% increase in worldwide droughts of the past couple of decades, whilst whacking forests with more intense wildfires than ever, following in the footsteps of hard-to-believe doubling of extreme wildfire events the past two decades. Will it double again as climate change’s hotter, drier conditions promote extreme wildfires, with ease. All mentions herein should put the 196 NDCs on sharp alert to fight climate change with everything they’ve got, but no!

Meanwhile, capitalism has a new voice in the debate as insurance companies now speak out about the dangers of climate change and its threat to the essence of capitalism, and as climate change severely undercuts the American dream with insurance rates and coverage a new wildcard inhibiting homeownership. Some regions in America becoming nearly uninsurable.

Data from researchers at the University of Maryland for the period 2001-2024 shows forest fires now burn more than twice as much tree cover as two decades ago. Nothing could be worse, absolutely nothing! As trees are one of the planet’s biggest storehouses of carbon. (The Latest Data Confirm Forest Fires Are Getting Worse, World Resources Institute, July 21, 2o25). So far, nobody has claimed this is fake news.

The Big Scary Monster Wildfire/Climate Feedback Loop

The stunning increase in forest wildfires, especially across the entire upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, has bred a gigantic feedback loop that turbo-charges global warming. The warming climate enhances forests wildfires, in turn, losing one of the planet’s significant offsets to CO2 as trees burn, emitting more CO2 and absorbing that much less CO2 in a vicious circle that feeds on itself. Severe Wildfires in Russia’s Siberia Region Rage Through 600,000 Hectares (1,500,000 acres) of Forests, CNN, May 14, 2025.

The overriding issue, for example, a UCLA-led study showed that California’s 2020 wildfires released double the amount of greenhouse gases the state had reduced in the previous 18 years through various initiatives. This horrifying statistic should shake world leadership to its core.

“The haunting orange skies over San Francisco in 2020. The devastating Black Summer of Australia in 2019-2020. The record-breaking Los Angeles wildfires of 2025. These aren’t isolated incidents, but rather stark indicators of a growing global crisis where climate change and wildfires form a devastating feedback loop.” (Climate Change Institute, The University of Maine, July 31, 2025)

Just imagine outrageously enormous out-of-control Canadian wildfires contributing to global warming! As of August 3, 2025, more than 16.3 million acres burned versus a 25-year normalized average of 5.4 million acres per fire season. (NASA Earth Observatory). Thankfully, NASA climate observatory satellites have not been decommissioned and destroyed, yet!

Oops! Why a NASA Satellite That Scientists and Farmers Rely on May be Destroyed on Purpose, NPR, August 4, 2025, per White House directions. This is why NPR must go.

Global warming, like fashion statements that change over time, has finally won over its strongest combatants in favor of mitigation measures but now unceremoniously promoting policies to increase global warming, to increase global heatwaves, to increase rising sea levels, to enhance massive wildfires that internally accelerate CO2 emissions, to expanding global droughts, to ensure bigger, faster, more intense flash flooding, especially China, and glacial lake outbursts that literally bury villages. These global events, exciting for nightly TV news coverage, are now assured of increasing in magnitude and scope as the Paris Agreement’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce greenhouse gases flutter midair, torn to shreds, drifting above Le Bourget superb of Paris where, 10 years ago, 196 nations shook hands, smiling and agreeing to tackle climate change amidst congratulatory backslapping and champagne toasts, now turned to vinegar!

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