Climate Change Denialism
A recent, disturbingly popular tweet I saw really hit me the wrong way. It's inconceivable that such mouth-breather arguments continue to persist in 2021. Yet here we are.
If you’re looking for more revealing articles surrounding the mass vaccination campaign, rest assured that I have not one but two in the works for release this coming this weekend.
In the meantime, I feel compelled to address another fundamental, existential threat to humanity (and another prime motivator for revolution) that has taken an undeserved backseat: CLIMATE CHANGE.
Why? Because of a stupid ass post on Twitter that is well on the way to 10,000 likes and 3,000 shares that promotes a truly dangerous and deceptive mindset.
And it pissed me off.
Due to the declining quality of education in the United States (which I feel I can say being that I’ve been a K-12 educator for over a decade) and a growing disinterest in academia as a whole as our attention span shifts toward rapid self-gratification via an onslaught of entertainment options (aka, distractions), it isn’t difficult to understand why we still give the pending climate disaster a backseat.
While the Covid-response threatens a partial genocide of the human race, climate change threatens to end our entire species. We cannot ignore this long-term threat despite the many short-term threats before us.
MOUTH-BREATHERS
Are people really pointing to cold-related weather events as an evidentiary refutation of climate change? Yes. Yes, they are.
This is precisely why climate scientists suspended the term global warming in the first place, to combat the confusion of mouth-breathers who obtusely presumed it meant higher temperatures everywhere. And yet this erroneous thinking continues to persist, a contagious idea still spreading much like a virus:
This illustrates the primary, fundamental misunderstanding of climate change denialists and it must not be allowed to permeate our collective consciousness.
I understand that referring to the naysayers as mouth-breathers won’t help to persuade them into recognizing the stark realities of climate science, but at the same time we must recognize that we will never be able to reach a percentage of such simpletons. Some intellectual exercises will always go over the heads of the low IQ population, which is why it’s only important that the majority understands and can articulate the science so we can move forward on this extremely time-sensitive situation.
The remaining minority has no place in this conversation, as they are an anchor to progressing on this thoroughly-evidenced, undeniable issue. They are the equivalent of flat-earthers. It might be harsh, but these are objectively dumb individuals who must be thoroughly ignored if they are stubbornly unwilling to be educated.
Until such denialists develop the capacity to level a legitimate counter-argument beyond their short-sighted misunderstanding of basic climate science, they should not and cannot be remotely entertained.
Sitting on a sinking ship just because a few knuckle-draggers deny that the waters are rising would be suicide.
WHEN BAD IDEAS SNOWBALL
You may recall when Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) made a similar denialist argument six years ago by bringing a snowball into the Senate during an unseasonably early onset of winter in D.C., as if this were somehow evidence that the most existential threat to our species, an entire field of science, were simply fake news.
Those who gave a damn about science immediately found this approach laughable, but the less scientifically-literate didn’t even chuckle. They actually took it seriously. And we know a percentage of people still do because the very same simplistic style of argument continues to be propagated, with Paul Joseph Watson’s tweet in 2021 being just one example.
IS CLIMATE CHANGE REALLY OUR BIGGEST PROBLEM?
Short answer? YES.
The only two species-level threats that one might argue are comparable would be Generalized AI and nuclear armageddon, but these are demonstrably easier to mitigate without radically changing the way in which we fundamentally live.
The U.S. and Russia, by far the two most dominant nuclear-powers, have repeatedly made mutual agreements to incrementally reduce nuclear arms. The world had a peak of 70,000 nukes in 1986 and we’ve managed to knock that down to 14,000 today. Clearly we are capable of solving this existential problem even if at a disturbing slow pace.
I say this because 14,000 nukes is hardly reassuring when a mere 100 nukes can eliminate all life on Earth. Which means humanity today has the capacity to end all plants, animals, all of it, on a planetary scale 1,400 times over.
YEAH.
Regardless, this problem is being actively addressed. There is no mystery about how to resolve it and we’ve already initiated the solution.
Generalized AI (or super-intelligence) could be stopped if we simply have the courage to crack-down on renegade tech companies, such as Google, which seem to have no problem with unleashing evil on the world. Some might argue that such a technological advancement is inevitable, but I’m not convinced that there is any evidence to support this.
Sure, technology as a whole will always continue to advance (baring a major catastrophe such as a solar flare strong enough to wipe out (most of) the electrical grid, setting us back for potentially decades, or an aforementioned nuclear armageddon that blocks out the sun) but we could undoubtedly apply the breaks in the specific field of artificial intelligence if we wanted to, even if it’s unlikely that we ultimately will.
And is it really an “advancement” to develop a technology that dooms the species? Sounds more like a step back rather than forward. Sure, the atom bomb was technically a technological advancement, but it didn’t advance humanity. Even Oppenheimer was horrified by his own invention.
Climate change is within our capacity to prevent, but requires a more radical shift in the way we live, making it far more difficult to effectively resolve. This exponential disaster has already kicked off the sixth mass extinction event, which should be daily headline. Everybody knows which empty-headed celeb Pete Davidson is shacking up with, yet hardly anyone knows that the most severe die-off since the demise of the dinosaurs is well underway. And most lawmakers in America still don’t believe it’s happening.
Both the severity of the problem and the disinterest in resolving it is why I argue that climate change is the greatest existential threat to our species.
To fix it we would essentially need to achieve the near-elimination of the oil and fracking industries, apply strict carbon regulations (just 100 companies, a majority based in the U.S., are responsible for 71% of global emissions) and institute a massive reduction in the Pentagon budget.
We would need a radical shift toward renewable energies, particularly solar, and a scaling down of our individual carbon footprint. Even with all these measures, so much damage has already been done that developing technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere will likely be our most-effective tool. Unfortunately, we don’t have an effective enough system that the markets will currently allow so the future remains too nebulous for comfort.
It’s becoming so desperate that psychopaths like Bill Gates is proposing that we partially block out the sun, a form of geo-engineering, but this would mean taking manual control of our climate. Are human beings really capable of taking on that responsibility…? I don’t think so.
In any case, civilization’s energy use as we know it must be thoroughly reimagined and quickly implemented in order to divert from cataclysmic disaster.
CLARIFYING CLIMATE CHANGE
To wrap this up, I’m going to briefly reiterate what climate change is. It’s sad that this even has to be explained at this point, but clearly confusion still persists. If this reaches even a dozen people it’ll be worth the effort.
(ahem)
Man-made climate change is caused by the rapid increase in overall global temperatures, not simply localized weather, brought on by growing levels of carbon emissions. These emissions trap heat, hindering it from escaping the atmosphere.
Much of it is absorbed by the oceans, creating warmer waters, which are the primary driver of weather. This sparks increasingly extreme events of all kinds. Droughts, floods, wildfires, snowfalls, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. Climate change is not just what you see outside your window.
This is why the false conclusion found in the stupid tweet regarding an early ice event in the Arctic does not disprove climate change.
On the contrary, it is further evidence supporting it.