Illustration by Corey BrightAaron Stuber - Opinions Columnistabstuber@uab.edu
With the days getting shorter and the nights getting cooler, it seems like a perfect time to curl up and read about climate change.
For such an incontestable hot topic, president-elect Donald Trump’s appointment of a climate change denier to the Environmental Protection Agency makes me think that The Donald probably doesn’t believe in science as much as he led us to believe during the election races.
Now, in a not-so-surprising twist, Myron Ebell accepted the job offer as head of the EPA.
Ebell is best known for his climate change skepticism, as well as his position as the head of the Cooler Heads Coalition. According to their website, the Cooler Heads Coalition is “an informal ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis.”
One of the group’s major points is that “the more you’re told that you have to believe something, the more you should question it.” While this ideology might have held clout when the church was in charge of scientific thought during Galileo’s time, we are now privileged to live in a time where science is not ruled by the cognitive dissonance of the people.
Even Pope Francis, head of the Catholic Church, has called on Catholics “to confess their sins against the environment, calling the degradation of the climate a sin against God.”
As of this year, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have surpassed the threshold of 400 parts per million. This threshold was determined as critical level, where extreme action must be taken to prevent further damage to our environment.
Furthermore, as time has progressed beyond the industrial revolution in the 1800s, the planet has warmed increasingly fast to a toasty 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit positive change in average temperature. This temperature has slowly pushed the boundary to the 2.7 degrees warming threshold, as defined by last year’s Paris climate agreement.
And as many climate change deniers would have it, they are welcoming this change in temperature because to them, it just means a “milder winter,” according to Ebell. Maybe they will be able to get better Instagram photos, but at what cost?
According to NASA, as the planet begins to warm there will be a change in sea level, coral reefs will begin to die and decolor from increased carbonic acid build up in ocean water, precipitation will become heavier leading to erosion, droughts will become more severe and the polar ice caps will melt faster than the 13.3 percent decline per decade we see today.
To the climate change deniers, this means your waterfront properties will sink into the ground. No, there isn’t enough money to fill the ocean in front of your house to stop it. Money can’t buy everything.
Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the History of Sciences at Harvard. In a study authored by Oreskes et. al., it was concluded that there was a “97 percent consensus [that humans are causing recent global warming] in published climate research is robust and consistent with other surveys of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies.”
This means that climate change is overwhelmingly supported by the scientific community. A community that relishes in the fact of ripping its peers down for the sake of truth.
Yet as political leaders continue to pump climate change denial and fear into their followers, it is important for scientists to present their argument in palpable ways. We must find ways to not only support environmental groups, but also to educate the masses, so that climate change rhetoric is not as scary as we are led to believe.
A movement planned for Dec. 2 will call on state senators to disapprove the appointment of Myron Ebell to the head of the EPA. If you were thankful this Thanksgiving for Mother Earth, give Jeff Sessions or Richard Shelby a ring. The world will literally thank you for it, and as a result future generations will inhabit it longer.
