The futility of climate change mitigation

What do you do? Do you gloat because you got even with all those evil corporate polluters who were destroyed when the carbon days ended? Or do you scream and shout, realizing that we have sacrificed our nation for nothing? Or do you take comfort in the mitigation we achieved through self-immolation? Are you proud that, by 2050, our act of total national self-destruction prevented the global temperature from going up by an additional 0.083 degrees Celsius, and sea levels from rising by 0.6 centimeters? It only cost the world its biggest economy and a people their entire livelihood…

The report’s author, Paul Knappenberger, made his assumptions “based on the [United Nations] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports.” He ran a scenario in which “the U.S. as a whole stopped emitting all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions immediately,” and found that “the ultimate impact on projected global temperature rise would be a reduction, or a ‘savings,’ of approximately 0.08°C by the year 2050 and 0.17°C by the year 2100–amounts that are, for all intents and purposes, negligible.” Under this wild scenario, not only do the rest of the world’s new emissions completely replace ours in just 6.6 years, but China’s growth alone replaces them in less than 11 years.