Good News, Bad News

India has ratified the Paris Agreement on climate change.  This is big deal.  The U.S. and China are in, and most of the European Countries. Only Russia demurs. Nevertheless it appears that the treaty will "enter into force".

The Paris Agreement will formally come into force next month, legally binding countries that have ratified the deal to act on the pledges made last year.

This includes a commitment by every country to prepare increasingly ambitious pledges to tackle greenhouse gas emissions every five years, known as Nationally Determined Contributions.

This is an important step forward.

The good news doesn't stop there.  The price of clean energy continues to drop

And Standing Rock may presage the beginning of a popular uprising against oil.

The corner may have been turned.  The Paris Agreement signifies that the the deniers have lost the battle

195 world nations have agreed to ignore climate science denial and cut carbon pollution as much as possible

So maybe the planet and the civilization on it will be saved.  Unfortunately, it may not be enough.

James Hansen, former NASA director and well-known climate scientist, is out with another dire climate warning: The last time that the Earth was this hot, the oceans were about 20 feet higher than they are right now.

And while that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re in for an unstoppable, 20-foot rise in sea level (although it ostensibly could get that bad), it does mean that the world is leaving a dangerous, and expensive, climate change problem for future generations.

“There’s a misconception that we’ve begun to address the climate problem,” Hansen told reporters on a press call Monday. “The misapprehension is based on the Paris climate summit where all the government leaders clapped each other on the back as if some great progress has been made, but you look at the science and it doesn’t compute. We are not doing what is needed.”

The consensus is this:  we are making important progress, maybe enough to prevent the worst of the predicted dire consequences, but it isn't going to be enough to hold off some of it such as the inundation of ocean shorelines where billions of people live.