DES MOINES -- Ho-hum. Another year.Another warning from the United Nations that we're turning the planet into an uninhabitable, disease-ridden, waterlogged cinder floating dead as Mars through the solar system until the sun itself curses us with its last flaring breath and dies of simple futility. The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change seems to have had enough of your bullshit and there are no words minced in its latest warning to us all.

"We have little time before the window of opportunity to stay within the 2C of warming closes," said Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC who launched the report in Copenhagen following meetings of the report's authors in the Danish capital. "To keep a good chance of staying below the 2C, and at manageable costs, our emissions should drop by 40 to 70 per cent globally between 2010 and 2050, and falling to zero or below by 2100," Dr Pachauri said.

Now, I'm no more a scientist than your average Republican congresscritter proclaims himself or herself to be, but I like to listen to them when they tell me things, and they are telling me that the blue marble is running out of chances very quickly.

IPCC found: Warming of climate is unequivocal with many of the observed changes unprecedented over decades to millennia; The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, snow and ice has diminished and sea levels have risen;Human emissions of greenhouse cases are the highest in history and concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the highest in at least 800,000 years; The acidity of the oceans has increased by 26 per cent since the beginning of the industrial era due to increases in carbon dioxide; Arctic sea ice has decreased over the period 1979 to 2013 at a rate of between 3.5 and 4.1 per cent per decade, while it has increased in the Antarctic due to strong geophysical differences between the two polar regions and, it t is "extremely likely" that human emissions of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and other sources are the dominant causes of the observed warming since the mid-20 Century.

As it happens, a group of Iowa scientists popped by the state capitol here a couple of weeks ago to talk about the effects of climate change on this state, which does not yet have any beachfront property to worry about, although we may be able to surf Ottumwa sometime in the future, if the UN panel is correct.

The group of scientists expressed concern that extreme weather events, including heavier rains and incidents of flooding, are increasing in frequency and severity as the atmosphere warms and holds more moisture. "Repeated heavy rains increase human exposure to toxic chemicals and raw sewage that are spread by floodwaters," said David Osterberg, a former state legislator and associate clinical professor in the UI Department of Occupational and Environmental Health. Higher water temperatures combine with high nutrient levels in farm states such as Iowa to create large, harmful algae blooms, which make water unsuitable for human and animal consumption and for recreation, he added. Mary Mincer Hansen, an adjunct professor at Des Moines University's College of Health Sciences MPH Program and a former state public health official, said infectious diseases are becoming more common in Iowa. That's because disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks live longer and expand their range due to longer summers with increased heat and moisture.

The report itself is pretty damn grim. For some time now, medical professionals have been talking about how the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, the primary carrier of dengue fever, has been both expanding its range and adapting itself to the new circumstances of its new territories. There already have been cases in Florida and Arizona. (Sporadic outbreaks have occurred in the continental United Statesfor some time.) And, given our current, cool and considered response to a single death from Ebola, which is not carried by mosquitoes, I'm not sanguine about how our politics would handle even a small outbreak of dengue fever, but I'm fairly sure we would blame immigrants, or the government, or the phases of the moon, but we would not blame climate change, not in the real sense of actually doing anything about it. Anyway, you've now got smart people talking seriously about dengue fever. In Iowa. Something's up with the planet, folks. Maybe it's time for us all to believe that.

But you won't see it as an issue here. If the most recent Iowa poll is to be believed -- and I don't, entirely, which we'll get to later -- then the state is preparing to send to the U.S. Senate one Joni Ernst, who is not fooled by those greedy scientists and their hoaxes. (Ernst also is not fooled by those subversives at the U.N. in general, what with their Agenda 21's and their secret plans to steal all our golfs.) Catch Ernst in a lucid moment, and she'll sing along with the "I'm not a scientist" flash-mob that has erupted on the Republican side during this midterm election cycle. But she still wants to do away with the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. She also has given no indication that she's the least bit curious about the crisis. There are a lot of phone numbers and e-mail addresses in that University of Iowa report. Since she's not tied up meeting any newspaper editorial boards, she could staff out a phone call or two.

Elsewhere in Iowa, of course, Steve King looks like he's going to get re-elected, and if Joni Ernst mendaciously declares her ignorance on the subject, King is utterly freaking hopeless, and, what's worse, he's proud of it.

KING: They have not made that scientific case. I have always argued against the science. Some of our leadership have said "don't argue the science." They get pollsters in and coach us. I'm not very coachable...(laughing)...But I've said "you don't ever give up a premise unless you happen to believe that they're right." And we should not concede the science of this. And they say, "you should just argue the economics, not the science." Well, no. They were wrong on the science."

Steve stood stalwartly against helping the victims of SuperStorm Sandy, and against those profligate New Jerseyites and New Yorkers who planned to take his government money and accessorize themselves, the way those layabouts in New Orleans once did.

"We want to get them the resources that are necessary to lift them out of this water and the sand and the ashes and the death that's over there in the East Coast and especially in the Northeast," King said during a Tuesday evening debate in Mason City, Iowa. "But not one big shot to just open up the checkbook, because they spent it on Gucci bags and massage parlors and everything you can think of in addition to what was necessary," he said later, referring to Hurricane Katrina.

All in all, this is a pretty bad time in history for one of our two political parties to be insane, and for our politics to be so cramped and childish as they are. Superstorms on the seaboards, and dengue fever, possibly coming to a cornfield near you. This is one helluva hoax the science guys have going on.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.