Sneezing and Smoke

Hard-core climate change deniers must be working overtime to protect their positions in the face of the daily and abundant evidence that the predictions of climate scientists about what a changed climate will look like are coming true.

Today’s Plain Dealer reports that the date of the onset of the ragweed allergy season is advancing. We will be sneezing longer. If we lived in California, sneezing would be the least of our breathing problems. The fire season is starting earlier, lasting longer, and being more devastating. Fire and smoke are more dangerous to most folks than is pollen.

Last week I read a 2016 report called “The Rockefeller Family Fund Takes on ExxonMobil.” (Let not the irony escape us!) It is part of the Fund’s explanation of why it is divesting in the fossil fuel industry. It details how ExxonMobil has marshaled and focused its resources to influence public opinion and political players into believing that if climate change is taking place, it’s not that bad, and in any case human activity is not responsible for it.  It compares ExxonMobil’s activities to the long-successful attempts by the tobacco industry to deny the adverse effects of smoking on health.

In both cases, the deliberate confusion caused by corporations’ manipulation and denial of scientific data means death to many. Deaths by smoking will look nothing compared to what deaths by unmitigated climate change may well look like.

One of the arguments deniers mount against the massive evidence for human-caused climate change is that it is the result of a conspiracy on the part of climate scientists. One can hardly imagine tens of thousands of scientists working on every continent pulling off such a hoax. If you think it would be easy to organize such an effort, you don’t know science and you don’t know scientists.

Which is, of course, my point.

It is a major tragedy in the making that our federal government is pulling back from even the modest advances we’ve made so far in the fight against climate change. Of course, denial of science (and of truth in general) is not new to these people. How long will the American public let them determine humanity’s future?