Arguments
Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn't what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?
Ocean advocates are increasingly concerned about climate change
Posted on 17 June 2019 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Daisy Simmons
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The world’s oceans are deeply affected by climate change – and vice versa. But until recent years, ocean advocates throughout California had long tackled issues like over-fishing and coastal pollution without as much emphasis on the broad-reaching relationship between climate and oceans.
That’s all changed, as evidenced by a March annual lobbying event at the state capitol.
In 2004, when a dozen or so advocates gathered for the first Ocean Day, “climate change was a side issue,” said Environment California’s Dan Jacobson, who launched the event.
When more than 200 people convened from throughout the state last month, climate had become “the overarching issue” in legislator meetings on a range of topics.
“It’s become an underlying theme in everything we’re doing,” said Jacobson. “Even the guy who literally rescues animals stranded on the shore is saying, ‘Of course, this is all getting worse because of climate change.'”
Fast facts on Ocean Day 2019
Through the day, small groups from a mix of organizations like Environment California, Surfrider, and Azul met with state assembly-members and senators on a range of key ocean issues, such as offshore drilling, plastic pollution, and sea-level rise – with conversations often touching naturally on climate change.
2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #24
Posted on 15 June 2019 by John Hartz
Editor's Pick
Costa Rica Doubled Its Forest Cover In Just 30 Years!
Costa Rica has a long-standing commitment to the environment. The country is now one of the leading nations of sustainability, biodiversity, and other protections. The country’s first lady, urban planner Claudia Dobles, said in an interview with The New York Times that they plan to be completely fossil fuel free by 2050 and that achieving that goal would combat a “sense of negativity and chaos” in the face of global warming. “We need to start providing answers,” she said.
Which is exactly what they’ve been doing. One of their most incredible feats so far is managing to generate all the country’s power from solely renewable sources for three years consecutively! Then there’s also what they plan to do, which is absolutely incredible – they are set to be carbon-free and plastic-free by 2021. In addition, they’ve tackled the dilemma of deforestation remarkably – resulting in a doubling of tree coverage across the country in the last 30 years.
After decades of deforestation, Costa Rica has reforested to the point that half of the country’s land surface is covered with trees again. That forest cover is able to absorb a huge amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, combating climate change for us all.
Costa Rica Doubled Its Forest Cover In Just 30 Years! by Andrea D. Steffen, Environment, Intelligent Living, June 4, 2019
Planetary health and '12 years' to act
Posted on 14 June 2019 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeffrey Kiehl
Life makes us wake up to needed changes.
A visit to the doctor’s office and accompanied tests indicate you have been diagnosed as pre-diabetic. Your doctor indicates two pathways to addressing the condition before things get worse. You can change your lifestyle, or you can take medication with possible side effects. If you accept the medical facts and adopt the first recommendation, then you will set a goal.
For example, “I will lose 20 pounds over the next three months and diligently monitor my glucose levels.” You talk with health and wellness experts and come up with a plan to reach those goals. Up to this point you have been in the stages of symptom diagnosis and receiving expert advice. Now, the hard work begins: You actually have to change the way you have been living your life.
You need to eat differently and exercise more, and you need to do these things every day for the rest of your life. You also need to monitor your progress to ensure you are meeting your goals. Initially, you may even question the accuracy of the diagnosis, or your doctor’s conclusion. You may even seek a second opinion. You wonder how long you can wait to change the way you have been living.
Of course, in any life-threatening situation, the answer to the question of “How long can I wait?” is obvious: You can’t, can’t wait. You must make changes in your lifestyle immediately. You must overcome any and all resistances to act.
Doing so, you discover that you lose weight and your glucose levels dramatically decline. You may even obtain a new diagnosis that you are no longer “pre-diabetic.” These are not easy goals to accomplish. Overcoming years of lifestyle behaviors is hard work. You will need encouragement and help from others, but it is possible. The other challenging part of this journey is to stick with the plan even after you have achieved your goals. Complacency will lead you back to the “at risk” category.
Japan’s deadly 2018 heatwave ‘could not have happened without climate change’
Posted on 13 June 2019 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Daisy Dunne
The record-breaking 2018 summer heatwave in Japan in which more than 1,000 people died “could not have happened without human-induced global warming”, a study finds.
And the extreme heat felt in Japan last summer could “become a usual situation” within the next few decades as temperatures continue to rise, the authors say.
The research is the latest in “attribution science”, a field that aims to quantify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, floods and droughts.
It follows analysis published in December which found that climate change made the UK 2018 summer heatwave up to 30 times more likely.
The study is “very interesting”, but requires “further confirmation” before its conclusions can be fully accepted, a leading attribution scientist tells Carbon Brief.
Climate change: sea level rise could displace millions of people within two generations
Posted on 11 June 2019 by Guest Author
Jonathan Bamber, Professor of Physical Geography, University of Bristol and Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Princeton University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Antarctica is further from civilization than any other place on Earth. The Greenland ice sheet is closer to home but around one tenth the size of its southern sibling. Together, these two ice masses hold enough frozen water to raise global mean sea level by 65 metres if they were to suddenly melt. But how likely is this to happen?
The Antarctic ice sheet is around one and half times larger than Australia. What’s happening in one part of Antarctica may not be the same as what’s happening in another – just like the east and west coasts of the US can experience very different responses to, for example, a change in the El Niño weather pattern. These are periodic climate events that result in wetter conditions across the southern US, warmer conditions in the north and drier weather on the north-eastern seaboard.
The ice in Antarctica is nearly 5km thick in places and we have very little idea what the conditions are like at the base, even though those conditions play a key role in determining the speed with which the ice can respond to climate change, including how fast it can flow toward and into the ocean. A warm, wet base lubricates the bedrock of land beneath the ice and allows it to slide over it.
Though invisible from the surface, melting within the ice can speed up the process by which ice sheets slide towards the sea. Gans33/Shutterstock
These issues have made it particularly difficult to produce model simulations of how ice sheets will respond to climate change in future. Models have to capture all the processes and uncertainties that we know about and those that we don’t – the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” as Donald Rumsfeld once put it. As a result, several recent studies suggest that previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports may have underestimated how much melting ice sheets will contribute to sea level in future.
Lobbying against key US climate regulation ‘cost society $60bn’, study finds
Posted on 10 June 2019 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Josh Gabbatiss
Political lobbying in the US that helped block the progress of proposed climate regulation a decade ago led to a social cost of $60bn, according to a new study.
Environmental economists Dr Kyle Meng and Dr Ashwin Rode have produced what they believe is the first attempt to quantify the toll such anti-climate lobbying efforts take on society.
The pair say their work reveals the power firms can have in curtailing government action on climate change, in the face of “overwhelming evidence” that its social benefits outweigh the costs, which range from reduced farming yields to lower GDP.
Crucially, they found that the various fossil-fuel and transport companies expecting to emerge as “losers” after the bill were more effective lobbyists than those expecting gains.
The authors say their results, published in Nature Climate Change, support the conclusion that lobbying is partly responsible for the scarcity of climate regulations being enacted around the world.
However, they tell Carbon Brief that there is still hope for those seeking to develop effective new climate policies:
“Our bottom line is: climate policy emerges from a political process. We’ve shown that this political process can undermine the chances of passing climate policy. But we’ve also shown that careful design of climate policy can help make it more politically robust to opposition.”
2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #23
Posted on 8 June 2019 by John Hartz
Editor's Pick
White House Tried to Stop Climate Science Testimony, Documents Show
Rod Schoonover at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
The White House tried to stop a State Department senior intelligence analyst from discussing climate science in congressional testimony this week, internal emails and documents show.
The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research declined to make changes to the proposed testimony and the analyst, Rod Schoonover, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, was ultimately allowed to speak before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday.
But in a highly unusual move, the White House refused to approve Dr. Schoonover’s written testimony for entry into the permanent Congressional Record. The reasoning, according to a June 4 email seen by The New York Times, was that the science did not match the Trump administration’s views.
White House Tried to Stop Climate Science Testimony, Documents Show by Lisa Friedman, Climate, New York Times, June 8, 2019
State of the climate: Heat across Earth’s surface and oceans mark early 2019
Posted on 6 June 2019 by Zeke Hausfather
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief
Global surface temperatures in 2019 are on track to be either the second or third warmest since records began in the mid-1800s, behind only 2016 and possibly 2017.
On top of the long-term warming trend, temperatures in 2019 have been buoyed by a moderate El Niño event that is likely to persist through the rest of the year.
That’s one of the key findings from Carbon Brief’s latest “state of the climate” report, a quarterly series on global climate data that now includes temperatures, ocean heat, sea levels, greenhouse gas concentrations, climate model performance and polar ice.
Ocean heat content (OHC) set a new record in early 2019, with more warmth in the oceans than at any time since OHC records began in 1940.
The latest data shows that the level of the world’s oceans continued to rise in 2019, with sea levels around 8.5 centimetres (cm) higher than in the early 1990s.
Atmospheric methane concentrations have increased at an accelerating rate, reaching record highs in recent months, though scientists are divided on the cause of this trend.
Arctic sea ice is currently at a record low for this time of year. Antarctic sea ice set new record lows in January, and is currently at the low end of the historical range.
Third warmest start to a year
Global surface temperatures are recorded and reported by a number of different international groups, including NASA, NOAA, Met Office Hadley Centre/UEA, Berkeley Earth and Cowtan and Way. Copernicus/ECMWF also produces a surface temperature estimate based on a combination of measurements and a weather model – an approach known as “reanalysis”.
The chart below compares the annual global surface temperatures from these different groups since 1970 – or 1979 in the case of Copernicus/ECMWF. The coloured lines show the temperature for each year, while the dots on the right-hand side show the year-to-date estimate for January through March 2019. Values are shown relative to a common baseline period, the 1981-2010 average temperature for each series. Surface temperature records have shown around 0.86C warming since the year 1970, a warming rate of about 0.19C per decade.
Year-to-date values are only shown for NASA, NOAA, and Copernicus as data for March is not yet available from the UK Hadley Centre, which also prevents the Berkeley Earth and Cowtan and Way records from being released. The year-to-date values in this chart will be updated when that data becomes available.
Climate Change vs Cosmological Catastrophe
Posted on 5 June 2019 by Guest Author
Global warming can be pretty terrifying. But so can space. Katie Mack (aka Astro Katie) battles ClimateAdam to decide whether we should be more scared of the end of the universe or our heating planet.
Effects of Global Warming
Posted on 3 June 2019 by Riduna
Why are young – and not so young – people becoming more vociferous in their protests about global warming? Why has climate change become a political and partisan issue at democratic elections? Why do ‘greenies’ try to stop the development of new coal mines and call for speedier reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions? The answer is that the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly Carbon Dioxide (CO2), are becoming increasingly evident and dangerous – although relatively mild at present, compared to what they could soon become.
Much is being said about the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in terms of lost jobs, lost income and harm to national and global economies but we hear relatively little about the catastrophic consequences of not reducing emissions. Prioritising short term profit and ideology ahead of emissions reduction will inevitably result in an uncontrollable, unpredictable and destructive climate resulting in socio-economic collapse.
Fig. 1. Fluctuations in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, relatively regular until burning of fossil fuels began about 200 years ago. Note the ‘spike’ on the right at year ‘0’ Source: Nasa.
Analysis of air trapped in ice cores shows that over the past 800,000 years the normal concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere varies between 170 parts per million (ppm) during cold periods (so called Ice Ages) to 260-300 ppm when the planet reaches its warmest. Concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere now stands at over 415 ppm and is continuing to rise at an accelerating rate as we burn ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels.
For well over a century it has been widely known that CO2 absorbs infra-red light reflected from the earths’ surface then re-emits it, much of it back to the surface. The higher the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the warmer the surface temperature gets, a phenomenon known as global warming which has a number of effects including 1. ocean warming, 2. loss of land-based ice and permafrost, 3. climate change which becomes less predictable and 4. sea level rise. Below is an outline of these effects.
2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #22
Posted on 1 June 2019 by John Hartz
Editor's Pick
12 books on how climate change is transforming businesses and the global economy
For some businesses and entrepreneurs, climate change isn't just a threat. It's an opportunity.
The significant transformations required to meet the challenges posed by climate change are, from another perspective, fabulous opportunities. Inventors, entrepreneurs, and business strategists recognized this fact many years ago. Their activities have since been chronicled and analyzed by reporters, researchers, and, in some cases, the entrepreneurs themselves.
For this month’s bookshelf on climate change and business, Yale Climate Connections has assembled two different lists. This first list covers books published in the last five years. The second list covers recent free reports on the same subject from international organizations, government agencies, and D.C.-based think tanks.
12 books on how climate change is transforming businesses and the global economy by Michael Svoboda, Yale Climate Connections, May 31, 2019
Humans and volcanoes caused nearly all of global heating in past 140 years
Posted on 30 May 2019 by dana1981
Emissions from fossil fuels and volcanoes can explain nearly all of the changes in Earth’s surface temperatures over the past 140 years, a new study has found.
The research refutes the popular climate denial myth that recent global warming is merely a result of natural cycles.
Those arguments have always suffered a key physical flaw, namely that cycles are cyclical. For example, El Niño events, which temporarily raise global surface temperatures by bringing warm water up to the shallow ocean layer, are offset by La Niña events, which have the opposite effect. While a given decade might have more El Niño or La Niña events, resulting in a short-term surface warming or cooling, over the long term their effects cancel out.
However, climate scientists have had a difficult time explaining exactly what caused a warming event in the early 20th century, between about 1910 and 1945. The average of the climate model runs incorporated in the last IPCC report only accounted for about half of the measured global surface warming trend during that period, and a study published last year suggested the other half could be due to natural cycles.
Contrarian scientists like Judith Curry, who is frequently invited by Republicans to testify before US Congress, have often used this discrepancy to cast doubt on the expert consensus on human-caused global warming, arguing that “until we can explain the early 20th century warming, I have little confidence IPCC and [National Climate Assessment] attribution statements regarding the cause of the recent warming.”
The new study, published in the Journal of Climate, tackles the discrepancy in part by addressing an issue with ocean temperature data during the second world war, when measurements were more often made from warmer engine room intakes than from buckets lowered over the side of ships. This has resulted in a bias, inflating estimated surface temperatures in the early-to-mid 1940s. The new study removed this bias by focusing on temperatures along continental and island coastlines.
Four scientists make creativity a key to communicating their research
Posted on 28 May 2019 by greenman3610
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
This month’s “This is Not Cool” original video, produced by independent videographer and YCC regular contributor Peter Sinclair, explores the creative science communication initiatives of four different scientists.
Ecohydrologist, researcher, and science storyteller Emily Fairfax of the University of Colorado studies the intersection of water and ecosystems. “It’s very important that my science has an impact in the world,” Fairfax says. “I take all my data and try to send it out to the public in very compelling ways.” She recalls being “so scared of all the jargon” earlier in her career: “I didn’t want to say a lot of different words, because what if I say them wrong? What if I use them wrong?”
Working on beavers and their forest environment, she decided to shorten her story to one sentence: “And that was that ‘beaver ponds persist through wildfires.'” If nothing else, she wanted her audience to leave with at least that message firmly in mind. With her infectious enthusiasm, the video shows a toy beaver persisting through a wildfire and then boosting an “I’m Okay!!” flag to assure fearful viewers that the beaver survives.
The Sinclair video also delves into the creative painting of glaciologist and artist Jill Pelto in remote glacial environments. Her scientist-father long encouraged her to include data in her art work after a field season in the North Cascades in Washington.
One-time cartoonist and founder of the Skeptical Science website John Cook, now at George Mason University in Virginia, describes how he uses cartoons to make climate change information more accessible. “I could be the first scientist to ever calculate the P value of a cartoon’s funniness,” Cook says, adding that the cartoons are “statistically significant and funny.”
Cook ran an experiment to test whether logic-based or humor-based corrections to climate misinformation were more effective, and “more importantly, do either of them work.” Cook says both “significantly neutralize misinformation, but the cartoons get an order of magnitude more shares than the logic-based.”
Beleaguered journalism interests seek to aid ailing planet
Posted on 27 May 2019 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bud Ward
Let’s buy for a moment the well-traveled viewpoint that the news media like nothing better than a good crisis. Nothing like a crisis, and better yet two, to kick reporters’ and editors’, let alone media bean counters’, adrenaline into overdrive. Bring on the banner headlines, the grit and joy of covering someone else’s disasters up-close and personal, perhaps even a greater shot at one of journalism’s more glamorous prizes or awards.
But what, one might ask, when the crisis is not someone else’s, but rather a crisis in the house of journalism itself? As with the current decades-old and decades-more-to-come demise of the subscriber- and advertiser-paid business model? What if, one well might wonder, the crisis is in journalism itself?
Commentary
And to compound the dilemma at hand, what if the crisis in journalism comes during an equally, and by all accounts even more serious (truly existential?) confounding crisis? As in misery loves company.
Take the climate change crisis as Exhibit A.
As luck would have it – bad luck, that is – the climate change crisis as we understand it, and as we don’t yet fully understand it, has been occurring and will continue to occur during a time of crisis for responsible journalism. Oh darn.
Journalism gurus pretty much accept that the ongoing crises of change surrounding and overwhelming many news enterprises will go on for a number of decades before, one hopes, we can all adapt to where it ends up. We can be pretty certain that our kids, and also theirs, will be dealing with this snowballing news/information dilemma for years, probably decades, to come.
The same, of course, applies to what many experts now feel can only fairly be characterized as a “climate crisis.” Again, as with journalism, it’s a crisis of our own making.
It’s not like there aren’t serious efforts to help mitigate the long-term harm, to avoid the worst possible impacts. And we can take comfort that that applies, at least for now, to both journalism and to climate change.
2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #21
Posted on 25 May 2019 by John Hartz
Editor's Pick
Why school strikers are guest editing Climate Home News
(Photo: Pixabay)
Over the coming weeks (or months – let’s see how it goes) Climate Home News will host reporting, personal reflections and commentary written by a group of young people who have inspired the world.
It’s normal for us to host commentary from activists. But this is something different. Something we would never normally do. It’s an open offer to a group to use our site as a platform to express their ideas.
We aren’t doing it because we endorse everything the school strikes or Fridays for Future movement says, does or calls for. We are doing it because it’s our job to bring you the full picture.
Climate change is the archetypal issue of intergenerational justice. As the population ages in many countries around the world, the balance of power between young and old is becoming increasingly skewed. Given the complexion of the media, it is fair to question whether their voices and interests are being represented here.
These young people have shown they are masters of disruptive forms of social media and protest. In March, just a few months after forming, they held a global strike that surpassed every organised climate rally held before it. They achieved this with no pre-existing organisational apparatus, real funding or control of traditional media platforms. They are worth listening to.
Why school strikers are guest editing Climate Home News by Karl Mathiesen, Climate Home News, May 23, 2019
New research, May 13-19, 2019
Posted on 23 May 2019 by Ari Jokimäki
Note! Weekly new research posts will not continue anymore. This is the last post in this series.
A selection of new climate related research articles is shown below. This post has separate sections for: Climate Change, Climate Change Impacts, Climate Change Mitigation, and Other Papers.
Climate change impacts
Mankind
Nepalese farmers’ climate change perceptions, reality and farming strategies
The impact of weather on economic growth and its production factors
Understanding Future Safety of Dams in a Changing Climate (open access)
Climate change adaptation in the private sector: application of a relational view of the firm
Introducing a new citizens initiative for carbon pricing in Europe
Posted on 22 May 2019 by BaerbelW
A new European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) called “The fast, fair and effective solution to climate change” was launched on May 6. The proposal asks that the European Commission introduce a carbon-pricing policy known as Carbon Fee and Dividend at the European Union level. The European Commission registered the proposal earlier this month.
Organizers behind the initiative now have one year until May 6, 2020 to gather the 1 million signatures needed for the European Commission to consider the proposal.
Scientists and economists agree: Putting an increasing price on pollution and giving the returns to households works. A steadily increasing price on fossil fuels will reduce pollution by leading companies and consumers to choose cleaner, cheaper options. All money collected would be returned fairly and for example every month to citizens as a dividend. Most low- and middle-income families will be better off by this policy.
The European Citizens' Initiative is a democratic instrument that enables every European citizen to shape policy by submitting a legislative proposal. If at least one million signatures are collected for a citizens' initiative, the Commission has to examine the proposal and indicate the steps it will take.
"We're at a turning point in history," says Brigitte Van Gerven, spokesperson for the Initiative. "After years of apathy for the climate problem, people have awakened, thanks to the actions of Greta Thunberg and the climate strikers. The challenge now is to convert this energy into a strong and ambitious climate policy."
As a policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Carbon Fee and Dividend was implemented earlier this year in Canada, where citizens have already received their “Climate Action Incentive” checks. In the United States, carbon-fee-and-dividend legislation has been introduced by members of both parties as the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act.
The policy is a concrete, realistic and financially feasible policy that is budget neutral for the government. Moreover, it is socially just, since it is not a tax increase, but a green tax shift - a redistribution from those who pollute a lot to those who pollute less.
Deep sea carbon reservoirs once superheated the Earth – could it happen again?
Posted on 21 May 2019 by Guest Author
Lowell D. Stott, Professor, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Droplets rising from the Champagne vent on the ocean floor in the Mariana Islands. Fluids venting from the site contain dissolved carbon dioxide. NOAA Ocean Explorer Lowell D. Stott, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
As concern grows over human-induced climate change, many scientists are looking back through Earth’s history to events that can shed light on changes occurring today. Analyzing how the planet’s climate system has changed in the past improves our understanding of how it may behave in the future.
It is now clear from these studies that abrupt warming events are built into Earth’s climate system. They have occurred when disturbances in carbon storage at Earth’s surface released greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. One of the grand challenges for climate scientists like me is to determine where these releases came from before humans were present, and what triggered them. Importantly, we want to know if such an event could happen again.
In a recently published study, my colleagues Katie Harazin, Nadine Krupinski and I discovered that at the end of the last glacial era, about 20,000 years ago, carbon dioxide was released into the ocean from geologic reservoirs located on the seafloor when the oceans began to warm.
This finding is a potential game-changer. Naturally occurring reservoirs of carbon in the modern ocean could be disturbed again, with potentially serious effects to Earth’s oceans and climate.
Earth has cycled between ice ages (low points) and warm interglacial periods over the past 800,000 years. But current climatic warming is occurring much faster than past warming events. NASA
Climate Adam reacts to Bill Nye: "The planet's on f@*&ing fire!"
Posted on 20 May 2019 by Guest Author
On Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Bill Nye went on a sweary tirade about climate change. But does shouting at the audience about global warming make anyone more likely to do anything about it?
Support ClimateAdam on Patreon: http://patreon.com/climateadam
2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #20
Posted on 18 May 2019 by John Hartz
Editor's Pick
12 excuses for climate inaction and how to refute them
Using moral clarity to counter defeatism around the climate crisis.
Shutterstock
There’s a reason why the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has successfully goaded powerful politicians into long-overdue climate action in just six months.
Thunberg, who is on the autism spectrum, has become a moral authority. Again and again, she’s clearly articulated how adults have shamefully abdicated their basic duties to protect today’s children and future generations from compounding climate catastrophe. “This ongoing irresponsible behavior will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind,” she told the British Parliament.
“You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children,” she declared at the United Nations.
Her ability to sway politicians and the public, in speeches and through the school strike movement, is now evident: European leaders have called for aggressive new carbon emissions reductions, citing her movement.
Fortunately, Thunberg is just one of many great minds helping us summon moral clarity to address the tricky problem of framing the climate crisis. That includes the writers David Wallace-Wells, George Monbiot, and Anand Giridharadas; the historian Jill Lepore; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), among many others.
As we dump more carbon into the atmosphere and the planet cooks, their arguments about what we’re up against — and why we must act now — are essential to cutting through the ties that keep us quiescent.
These thinkers have inspired us to overcome our own psychological roadblocks in facing the climate crisis. The words of writer James Baldwin are helpful here too: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Drawing from these and other wells of wisdom, we’ve put together 12 short answers to some of the most stymying questions to help you work through climate despair, cynicism, defeatism, and paralysis. We can’t delay any more; it’s past time for productive panic.
12 excuses for climate inaction and how to refute them by Eliza Barclay & Jag Bhalla, Energy & Environment, Vox, May 17, 2019
