Veteran environmental reporter Dave Roberts gives us some bad news — No country on Earth is taking the 2 degree climate target seriously (Vox, October 4, 2016).

Before I get into this, I want to point out that DOTE is the only website on Earth (to my knowledge) which has consistently and insistently predicted the depressing outcome Roberts is so concerned about.

You would think such insight would count for something, but on this planet, among Homo sapiens, it basically counts for nothing. Which tells you something right there.

OK, here we go.

One of the morbidly fascinating aspects of climate change is how much cognitive dissonance it generates, in individuals and nations alike.

'Cognitive dissonance' is a Flatland term which doesn't get to the bottom of things. I'll make a few remarks about that below.

The more you understand the brutal logic of climate change — what it could mean, the effort necessary to forestall it — the more the intensity of the situation seems out of whack with the workaday routines of day-to-day life. It’s a species-level emergency, but almost no one is acting like it is. And it’s very, very difficult to be the only one acting like there’s an emergency, especially when the emergency is abstract and science-derived, grasped primarily by the intellect. This psychological schism is true for individuals, and it’s true for nations.

Generalizing, we might conclude that this so-called "psychological schism" is true for humans.

Take the Paris climate agreement. In Paris, in 2015, the countries of the world agreed (again) on the moral imperative to hold the rise in global average temperature to under 2 degrees Celsius, and to pursue "efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees." To date, 62 countries, including the United States, China, and India, have ratified the agreement. Are any of the countries that signed the Paris agreement taking the actions necessary to achieve that target? No. The US is not. Nor is the world as a whole. The actions necessary to hold to 2 degrees, much less 1.5 degrees, are simply outside the bounds of conventional politics in most countries. Anyone who proposed them would sound crazy, like they were proposing, I don’t know, a war or something. So we say 2 degrees is unacceptable. But we don’t act like it is.

There it is.