mass migrations

The Salvation of Climate Change Deniers

Climate change deniers have painted themselves into a corner. They are victims of their own rhetoric based on illogical conclusions drawn from a fairly limited world view. Many do not seem to have paid attention in grade school, let alone have the skill set for a statesman entrusted with the life and death decision-making so necessary to preserve our planet. We should be helping them find a pathway away from this dead end, even though for some it may be too late.

Woodleywonderworks Flickr/creative commons

Woodleywonderworks
Flickr/creative commons

The theocratic GOP is a font of bad ideas and cowardly inaction, but both sides of the debate, and the media, have framed the question completely wrong in the first place, and it has nothing to do with science.

The environmental movement long ago won the science debate, and the climate change deniers will always cling to those few studies that counter the overwhelming evidence of the environmental carnage that’s here with us already with more to come.

You can produce dozens of charts that show the spiking environmental impact of man and machines since the Industrial Revolution, and it will still not be enough for a climate denier intent on allowing the rape of the earth’s natural resources for the profit of corporate elites, and those in government who benefit financially and politically by protecting them.

That fact, these seemingly irreconcilable and immovable differences — literally strangling the air we breath and the water and food we consume — proves that we have reached the end of this debate.

We need not strive in this arena anymore because there is a better, and more logical and more useful replacement for the climate change debate.

The issue of the causes of environmental changes is moot because we are already in the early decades of quite a long and fragile period that promises to be devastating to the world economies and security. We just have to look around and pay attention, real attention.

Even setting aside for a moment all the groundwater pollution (and earthquakes) caused by such enterprises as fracking, consider that entire ancient island populations have been forced already to migrate because rising sea levels have ruined all their groundwater. Entire populations, men, women, children, everything, leaving blighted land that once was a natural paradise.

More appropriate questions will replace debate, such as, “How many white people must be displaced by rising sea levels or other environmental catastrophes before we can end this grade-school debate and join in global action?”

As I wrote yesterday, this is one of VenusPlusX’s key issues because if we ruin our planet, our search for social and economic justice means little.

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As I wrote yesterday, this is one of VenusPlusX’s key issues because if we ruin our planet, our search for social and economic justice means little.

For more . . .
What do Sex and Gender have to do with Climate Change and Net Neutrality
Silencing Climate Change Deniers
Response to Climate Change Impossible Without a Revolution in Thinking

 

Silencing Climate Change Deniers

According to a new study in the journal Science,”Four boundaries are assessed to have been crossed, placing humanity in a danger zone.”

 

The report defined climate change and loss of species as two core areas of concern. Each “has the potential on its own to drive the Earth System into a new state should they be substantially and persistently transgressed,” the authors wrote.

via Oxfam International Flickr/creative commons

via Oxfam International
Flickr/creative commons

It would almost seem absurd at this point to recognize anyone, high or low, who would argue that the human impacts on the environment have not already reached the “danger zone.” But it’s not absurd, it’s a very, very sad state of current reality.

Alas, we must continue equip ourselves to silence climate deniers by repudiating their arguments, whether a politician or your grumpy uncle Joe, through conversations, publishing, and activism. Quoting from studies or books, such as Naomi Klein’s  This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, may help but, unfortunately, these deniers are almost always so proud of their defiance in the face of irrefutable evidence that they refuse to take new information in. If you look closely, you will see that this resistance to new information is a character flaw that seeps into other areas of their thinking, and is therefore hard to overcome.

The cataclysmic results of climate change are already upon us, mass migrations, shrinking coastlines, salinization of drinking water, food scarcity, etc. Are we doomed to wait for the elite to start suffering??

We must keep the pressure on, especially leading up to the hopeful Paris climate summit (Conference of Parties or COP) in December 2015 that will be pushing for ambitious action before and after 2020. Start, if you haven’t already, by updating yourself and staying informed through websites such as the United Nations Climate Change Newsroom. We don’t have a moment to wait, literally.