Over the past few decades, Republican politicians and fossil fuel industry lobbyists have employed both public relations and mainstream media channels to promote pseudoscience which perpetuates a single myth: climate crisis is a hoax.
This climate change denial campaign has undermined efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions since the seventies. Meanwhile, intertwined crises of acidic ocean waters, plastic pollution, polar ice caps melting and increasingly severe storms all contribute to making the Earth a more dangerous place.
Last year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a 1,500-page report assessing the planet’s ecosystems. Based on thousands of scientific studies, the IBPES reports that deforestation, factory farming, overfishing, urban growth and overpopulation, invasive species, pollution and other factors have drastically changed the majority of Earth’s land and ocean habitats. According to the data, “around one million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss”.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consists of leading climate scientists across the globe. The panel emphasizes the serious consequences of unchecked global warming and has stated that the window of opportunity has narrowed to as few as 12 years.
In a TED talk, author Yuval Noah Harari stated that “nationalism has no solution to climate change. If you want to be a nationalist in the 21st century, you have to deny the problem. ... In order to confront climate change, we need additional loyalties and commitments to a level beyond the nation.”
Climate change skeptics, more accurately labeled as “deniers”, disregard evidence that supports humanity’s actions as a major cause of global warming and yet embrace any article, op-ed, blog post or “scientific” study that argues against global warming.
According to Margaret Klein Salamon, founder of an advocacy group called Climate Mobilization, “The Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry have put billions of dollars into lying to the American public, even sending literature to science teachers in schools. They are so well organized and have managed to turn climate change into a controversial subject that gets shut down. It’s clearly working. There is also the issue of American individualism, remnants of manifest destiny, that don’t set us up well for understanding that we are part of the web of life. The American dream is quite self-involved. We need a new American dream.”
Sources
Comments