I’m seeing news reports like this nearly every day, as the Republican Party sinks ever deeper into nihilistic science-denial: Pair of NASA studies reaffirm impact of global warming.

In recent research, Mr. Hansen and co-author Makiko Sato, also of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, compared the climate of today, the “Holocene”, with previous similar “interglacial” epochs — periods when polar ice caps existed but the world was not dominated by glaciers.

In studying cores drilled from both ice sheets and deep ocean sediments, Mr. Hansen found that global mean temperatures during the “Eemian” period, which began about 130,000 years ago and lasted about 15,000 years, were less than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today. If temperatures were to rise two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times, global mean temperature would far exceed that of the Eemian, when sea level was four to six meters higher than today, said Mr. Hansen.

Meanwhile, researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, investigated how Earth’s plant life is likely to react over the next three centuries as Earth’s climate changes in response to rising levels of human-produced greenhouse gases. Study results are published in the journal Climatic Change.

“For more than 25 years, scientists have warned of the dangers of human-induced climate change,” said Jon Bergengren, a scientist who led the study while a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. “Our study introduces a new view of climate change, exploring the ecological implications of a few degrees of global warming. While warnings of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and other environmental changes are illustrative and important, ultimately, it’s the ecological consequences that matter most.”

In addition to altering plant communities, the study predicts climate change will disrupt the ecological balance between interdependent and often endangered plant and animal species, reduce biodiversity and adversely affect Earth’s water, energy, carbon and other element cycles.

The study comes as scientists have warned that increases in temperature could cause large areas of permafrost to melt, resulting in the released of large amounts of methane gas.

The significance of that last paragraph is huge; methane is a much more efficient heat trap than carbon dioxide, and if large amounts of methane are released into the atmosphere we could see a truly apocalyptic scenario develop in our lifetimes.

The Republican Party is going to have hell to pay when the consequences of their insanely irresponsible anti-science positions become disastrously clear.