Climate Change and the Clocks of Reality and Denialism
On April 8, millions of people looked to the skies to view a rare celestial event — a total solar eclipse. They knew exactly when it would begin and end. Air B&Bs were completely booked all along the path of totality months ahead of time. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all watched it, some traveling many miles and taking off work for the event. No one doubted that it would occur as predicted or thought it might be a hoax. They trusted the science behind it and the scientists who told them exactly when and where it would be viewed.
One wonders why we trust the science of astronomy but cast doubt on climate science predictions warning us of catastrophic changes to our planet. These changes have been caused by us and have made our planet warmer than at any time humans have inhabited it. We have known about climate change for years. In 1979, climate scientists warned that if we didn’t take action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, we would see alarming changes in climate by the end of the 20th century. Toothless calls to action in the eighties and nineties, particularly the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, did little to halt the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. On the contrary, since 1979, the world has seen a whopping 65% rise in emissions.
In a Time Magazine article in April 2022, Eugene Linden writes that our current perilous situation is the product of the interaction of four different realms. Imagine each realm as a clock moving at different speeds: 1) Reality, 2) The Scientific World, 3) Public Opinion, 4) the World of Business and Finance. Each successive realm lags behind the others: science needs time to gather and analyze data and disseminate it, public opinion needs time to digest the science, and those in the world of business and finance often prefer to challenge any news or the data upon which it might be based, fearing regulatory actions that might interfere with profits.
Efforts to reject the science, campaigns to confuse, and full-blown denialism didn't have to become so pervasive. Republicans could have taken the lead in halting and reversing climate change. In a campaign speech in Aug. 1988, George H.W. Bush said, “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect are forgetting the White House effect. In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House. It will include the Soviets, the Chinese. We will talk about global warming.” Sometime between that speech and the conference (to which the Chinese were not invited), the openness to discussing global warming was stifled. For example, in briefing papers cabinet members were warned not to use the terms “global warming” or “greenhouse effect.” Linden notes this is “akin to convening a pandemic conference but being forbidden to mention Covid.”
The obscuring and blurring of facts by businesses, lobbyists, and politicians began and remains the big drag on any real and meaningful action on climate change. Climate change became a perfectly polarized political issue, with the previous President declaring it to be a “Chinese hoax.” More recently, Trump essentially offered to enact policies favorable to the fossil fuel industry in return for a billion dollars in campaign contributions (despite the negative consequences this would have on climate change). The Biden administration, on the other hand, passed the most significant legislation yet to deal with climate change, the “Inflation Reduction Act.” This demonstrates the stark difference between Democratic and Republican policy making on climate change: Democrats ask, “How do we protect our environment while also protecting our economy and ensuring that the people are OK?” while Republicans ask “How do we maximize the profits of our largest corporations?”
Meanwhile, that first clock, the clock of reality, ticks ever louder every year, as previous heat records are shattered over and over and the Thwaites “doomsday” glacier of Antarctica continues to melt at levels faster than climate scientists have predicted. “If it collapses entirely, it might cause a domino effect of other melt events that could increase sea levels by 10 feet. And it appears highly likely (without major economic and social change) that global temperatures will rise by 2 degrees C or more, causing global sea levels to rise by as much as 6.6 feet.” (Salon.com) By 2100, the earth will be hotter than at any time before humans inhabited this planet. It will be uninhabitable for much of the ocean life today, as the ocean continues to absorb the majority of the planetary warming and ocean average temperatures continue to spike. It’s hard to predict exactly what the planet will be like for humans, plants, and animals by 2100, but we know all life on earth will be affected by vast changes, changes that could have been prevented with a little more foresight and concern for the legacy we leave behind for future generations.
When I ask my children if they have anything to say about climate change, and the fact that we’ve known about the science for decades but couldn’t or wouldn’t make the necessary shifts to mitigate it, they answer that Greta Thunberg’s speech to the United Nations on climate change says it all: “They rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist… [it] is not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences… You are failing us… How dare you!”