Tropical cyclones, known as hurricanes and typhoons in other parts of the world, have caused huge damage in many places recently. The United States has been hit by Hurricane Milton, within two weeks of Hurricane Helene. Climate change made their impacts much worse.

Ex-president Donald Trump has pledged to dismantle the Biden administration’s “green new scam” in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. He vowed to boost production of fossil fuels; oil, natural gas and coal, and repeal key parts of the Biden 2022 climate law.

During his first term in office, Trump dismantled much of the groundwork laid by his predecessor Barack Obama. Trump rolled back nearly 100 different environmental rules and regulations on air pollution, carbon emissions and toxic substances.

When voters go to the polls on 5 November, they’ll likely be locking in four years of vastly different climate change policy. Don’t forget the summer 2024 was Planet Earth’s hottest on record. Phoenix climbed over a scorching 110 degrees on 80 days in 2024 — shattering last year’s record of 55 days of temperatures over 110 degrees. Trump will make life hot, not cool.

But even more dangerous is that scientists using ice-breaking ships and underwater robots have found the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is melting at an accelerating rate and could be on an irreversible path to collapse, spelling catastrophe for global sea level rise. Thwaites holds enough water to increase sea levels by more than 2 feet and its collapse could ultimately lead to an 8-10 feet of sea level rise, devastating coastal communities from Miami and London to Bangladesh and the Pacific Islands.

New heat records come amid 13 months in a row of record-breaking temperatures on Earth; not just over land, but in the oceans too. Before 2023, the record highest temperature was 16.8 °C, set in August 2016. Since mid-2023, the planet has broken that 2016 threshold 58 times.

Jews and Muslims must concentrate on the challenges facing our world. Both Islam and Judaism teach their followers to take care of the earth. Muslims and Jews also believe that humans should act as guardians and trustees (stewardship and khalifah) off our planet, and that they will be held accountable by God for their actions.

If humans will not reduce man made carbon magnification, not even the coming of Mahdi and Messiahs may be able to overcome human unwillingness to reverse human pollution. God demands that humans fulfill their God given responsibilities.

Meanwhile, in human societies corruption heats up and self-centeredness increases. In France an estimated 216,000 children were victims of sex abuse by some 3,000 people — two-thirds of them priests — within France’s Catholic Church over the past 70 years, according to a major reckoning of clerical sex abuse covered up by Catholic authorities.

The total economic losses caused by natural disasters hit an estimated $72 billion in the first half of 2022, fueled by storms and floods, Swiss reinsurance giant Swiss Re estimated. And according to a 2020 Oxfam report, the richest 10% of the global population produce half of the Earth’s fossil-fuel emissions, while the poorest half contribute a mere 10%.

And for the first time in two decades, there are now more closed autocracies than liberal democracies in the world according to the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem Institute) at the University of Gothenburg. The democratic melting decline has taken place globally, and an increasing number of people are living in closed autocracies.

The level of democracy enjoyed by the average world citizen in 2022 is back to........

© Eurasia Review