Big effing deal. Anthony Scaramucci, a second-class asshole, lost his job working for a first-class asshole. But that ultimately meaningless story is all the rage. Meanwhile there’s this:

Earth to warm 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, studies say

By the end of the century, the global temperature is likely to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

This rise in temperature is the ominous conclusion reached by two different studies using entirely different methods published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday.

You can go read that CNN story for the methodologies involved and other details, but if the following doesn’t interest you more than one of Tr-mp’s chumps losing a job he was eminently unqualified to do (which happens so regularly now that it doesn’t even qualify as news), then you are missing the larger meaning of all the stuff going on, what CNN termed “a grim reality”:

“These studies are part of the emerging scientific understanding that we’re in even hotter water than we’d thought,” said Bill McKibben, an environmentalist not affiliated with either study. “We’re a long ways down the path to disastrous global warming, and the policy response — especially in the United States — has been pathetically underwhelming.”

Fareed Zakaria said on Sunday morning that the United States was “becoming irrelevant” in the world because of “the bizarre candidacy of Donald Tr-mp, which has been followed by an utterly chaotic presidency.” But even though Zakaria is right about the chaos we see each and every day, and even though he correctly cites a Pew study that shows “People around the world increasingly believe they can make do without America,” he is wrong about our irrelevancy, as anyone who understands climate change can tell you. We are very relevant. It matters that Tr-mp is a coal-loving fool. And it matters that he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on carbon emissions, which first set the 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit mark as a threshold. Why? Because,

If we surpass that mark, it has been estimated by scientists that life on our planet will change as we know it. Rising seas, mass extinctions, super droughts, increased wildfires, intense hurricanes, decreased crops and fresh water and the melting of the Arctic are expected.

The impact on human health would be profound. Rising temperatures and shifts in weather would lead to reduced air quality, food and water contamination, more infections carried by mosquitoes and ticks and stress on mental health, according to a recent report from the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.

Currently, the World Health Organization estimates that 12.6 million people die globally due to pollution, extreme weather and climate-related disease. Climate change between 2030 and 2050 is expected to cause 250,000 additional global deaths, according to the WHO.

If you think these two latest studies are outliers, think again:

The study confirms conclusions of many other studies, said Bill Hare, director and senior scientists of nonprofit Climate Analytics. Hare was not affiliated with either study.

“This interesting paper confirms the conclusion about where the world is headed unless there is a major increase in the ambition of climate and energy policies,” Hare said….

“It shows, in effect, that unless we start reducing emissions quickly — soon there is a risk that we will overshoot temperature limits like 1.5 or 2 degrees C,” Hare said. “It is just another confirmation of how dangerous the present situation is unless CO2 emissions, which have flatlined in the last few years, really start dropping.”

The solution, if there is one, to this disturbing problem (disturbing even if you, like me, won’t live long enough to feel its worst effects) is, of course, public policy. And unfortunately our public policy on this and so many other critical issues is in the hands of an incompetent, incoherent, and tragically indifferent buffoon. The CNN story ends with this:

“There are only two realistic paths toward avoiding long-run disaster: increased financial incentives to avoid greenhouse gas emissions and greatly increased funding for research that will lead to at least partial technological fixes,” said Dick Startz, economist and co-author of the second study. “Neither is free. Both are better than the catastrophe at the end of the current path.”

Silver linings and hope are hard to find in climate change studies, but they also don’t account for every factor.

“The only bright point is that, as the study authors say, they haven’t factored in the plummeting cost of solar power,” McKibben said. “That’s the one way out we still might take — but only if our governments take full advantage of the breakthroughs our engineers have produced.”

Yeah, well, good luck with our government taking full advantage of such breakthroughs. And good luck with getting a significant number of people to pay attention to this alarming story. After all, today we’ve got The Mooch to distract us, and tomorrow it will be some other insignificant intrigue inside the crumbling White’s House or, Allah forbid, a twisted tweet.