0422blog
Still Inconvenient
Writing about climate change is so boring which is somewhat ironic given that the planet is plummeting toward devastation while last year was the hottest on record, wildfires have been consuming much of the planet and droughts are increasing but never mind, because it’s just so stodgy and if you were listening to the former, former president over the last four terrible years, and many were listening, climate change is nothing more than a hoax, a conspiracy created by the Chinese, the same people who brought you Chinese Flu, otherwise known as the COVID-19 pandemic, which Trump bungled in his response and which continues to ravage the world.
We are a nation predominantly populated by ostriches who believe it makes more sense to risk our lives and the lives of our children on advice from a rube who never met a scientific principle he didn’t hate than to heed warnings by virtually every mainstream scientific organization in the world and no, this is not chicken little, screaming that the sky is falling because the sky really is falling.
We were faced with a worldwide pandemic and somehow vaccines were developed and it would seem we are about to rid ourselves of the latest plague. Someone should please tell me why the same energy can’t be harnessed to halt climate change, which, I don’t know, is it really any more confounding than COVID-19?
It’s just too painful and too complicated and too time-consuming and too depressing and too hopeless and too frustrating to even think about climate change and anyway the Chinese won’t cooperate, leaving the U.S. to drown and why not just give up and accept the planet is irrevocably doomed to burn into a cinder of charcoal.
The truth is still inconvenient.
It’s April 22, the annual Earth Day, a time for boys and girls, men and women, grandfathers and grandmothers to celebrate the wonder of the earth and a time to clean up streams, pick up litter, hold hands and sing “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” and proclaim our undying and unending love and gratitude for the earth.
Never mind that Americans still buy 17 million gasoline-burning vehicles each year, use of coal worldwide is increasing, particularly in China, India, Japan, Indonesia and Vietnam, species are becoming extinct under the weight of climate change, severe hurricanes and tornadoes, water supplies are dwindling world wide, the poorest countries will be hurt the most and it’s been 15 years since Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his dire warnings about global warming and no he never said he invented the Internet.
And then there was Trump whose famous tweets included:
2012: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
2013: “Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee — I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”
2014: “Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!”
And lastly, 2014: “Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air — not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense.”
You tell them, Donald.
Many experts point to 1988 as the year when global warming took the spotlight as that summer was the hottest on record, up until then, and 1988 also saw widespread drought and wildfires within the United States.
The concerns about global warming, more specifically referred to as climate change, are not exactly something new. In 1966, Nobel Prize winner Glenn T. Seaborg, chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, warned “At the rate we are currently adding carbon dioxide to our atmosphere (six billion tons a year), within the next few decades the heat balance of the atmosphere could be altered enough to produce marked changes in the climate — changes which we might have no means of controlling even if by that time we have made great advances in our programs of weather modification.”
In the early 19th century, scientists first considered that the natural greenhouse effect was causing the planet to warm. Later that century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change the climate. In the 1960s, the evidence for the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing. By the 1990s, the consensus was that greenhouse gases were deeply involved in most climate changes and human-caused emissions were bringing discernible global warming.
In June 1988, James E. Hansen, the former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was among the first to determine that human-caused warming had already measurably affected global climate. One year later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established under the United Nations to provide a scientific view of climate change and its political and economic impacts. The panel was created at a time when studies predicted that as massive glaciers at the poles melt, sea levels could rise between 11 and 38 inches by 2100, enough to swamp many of the cities along the east coast of the United States.
A milestone treaty on climate change, the Paris Climate Agreement, was signed by President Obama in 2015 as the U.S. and 196 other countries pledged to set targets for greenhouse gas cuts and to report their progress. Then Trump was elected in 2016 and as was his want, he pulled out the rug and the country from the Paris treaty, saying it included “onerous restrictions” and was “a deal that punishes the United States.”
Trump is gone and President Biden is working to restart the process and even if it’s way, way past time to get the world in order, if that is even a remote possibility, we have to try.