The Climate Argument (RTB)
As most late-night gatherings go, few rounds of drinks with friends brought in couple of debates that turned into disagreements. The range of topics and disagreements varied, and like any team sport, each one looked for supporters for their side of the argument. From all possible controversial topics (politics, gun regulation, religion, bad movies) somehow we ended up talking about climate change.
To be clear, it wasn't so much about if either one of us believed in climate science or not. More so about climate education. Specifically, one of us recalled being in the company of a climate change denier and how convinced they were in their denial. The debate centered around if this person should have been confronted with facts or left alone in their ignorance.
Being a skeptic has always been an important role in our society. Scientific method is built on theories standing up to challenges and being scrutinized publicly. When we get the same results after repeated tests, the debate is considered settled and we move on to the next unknown. If the results only hold in special conditions, then the theory isn’t complete and we keep working to complete it. That’s regardless of authors stature. Even Einstein had to abandon his static universe model and support Edwin Hubble’s conclusions of expanding universe after red shifts were repeatedly measured.
Debating scientific theories, confirming their results and scrutinizing any predictions is at the very heart of scientific revolution and our successful civilization.
Just look at your phone — 1000s of research hours have resulted in 100s of individual components and software magic that make it a triumph of human ingenuity. All fitting nicely in your hands, with a promise of further improvements in the future.
Most common climate denials I have heard are variations of — humans simply cannot cause global climate change, there was an ice age before and humans didn’t cause it, everybody is being an alarmist, and my favorite, we can’t trust the scientist or the climate proponents because they fly in jet planes.
This denial is similar to the flat earth or moon landing debate. More knucklehead stuff that can be easily disproved, but also is so dumb that you can’t bother to correct it. The current climate denial lobby most closely reminds me of the cigarette lobby where we casually ignored the harmful consequences of their product. The media and our political system was rigged to look the other way or worse, paid to actively discredit the scientific work. All for a profit motive.
Scientists have spent years collecting data on the ground and from high above. Only by building capabilities to monitor our weather (including our Sun) and sending out probes to understand atmospheric evolution of other planets, have we been able to complete Earth’s climate model. This has led to two major conclusions — Earth is not unique in its climate and human activity is directly responsible for its destruction. Only scientific illiteracy would lead anyone to believe that we can escape this reality, or even worse, deny it.
The most frustrating part now is that we have gone past the time of having these debates. We are already seeing adverse effects of climate change and most predictions show we are on an accelerated path to more frequent and violent disasters. We cannot afford to ignore scientific consensus on this. Listen to the experts 👇
So you might ask again what was this debate about? Reflecting back, it wasn’t really a debate. Perhaps I expected my close friends to be better prepared about tackling climate deniers. But part of me also questioned the usefulness of convincing any climate deniers. The futility of it all became overwhelming.
Of course they were right. Even if one person can be convinced to take climate change seriously, they might make changes to their own lifestyle, influence others or even better — actively work to elect climate science leaders to take bolder action. There is still space between freaking about climate change and giving up on climate education.
To bring this long thread to a close, I offer couple of pieces of advice
- Talk to your family & friends about climate change. It’s not the most juicy topic, but it will require you to learn few things — believe me, it will be worth it.
- Don’t get drowned by the futility of it all. We are not done yet and giving up is not an option. I say that for our kids and future generations.
