Denying Climate Reality

PEOPLE HAVE KNOWN ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE a long time, more than a hundred years. In the eighteen nineties, Swedish scientist August Arrhenius (1859-1927), the first Swede to win a Nobel prize in science, pioneered the science of physical chemistry, which ties chemistry to physics. He used this new science to calculate the approximate amount of carbon human industrial activity was putting into the atmpsphere over a period of time, how much solar heat it would trap, and how much this trapped heat would warm up the planet, over time. His calculations turned out to be amazingly accurate. It had already been noticed that global temeperatures were rising, and Arrhenius's work explained why and how, in 1897, nearly a hundred and thirty years ago.In 1852 the sun didn't shine for four days in London, and four thousand people dropped dead, as a blanket of deep black coal smog covered the city. People began to ask what would happen if European cities continued to fill their ckies with coal dust. The answer is climate change. After World War Two, carbon injection into the atmosphere increased dramatically, as industry expanded. In 1956 an article in the New York Times talked aobut increasing temperatures, global warming, and climate change, claiming that in the future tropical species of animals like parrots would be migrating to the north pole, as glaciers, polar ice caps, and igloos melted. Until the nineteen sixties climate change, although gradually encroaching, was largely ignored, until scientist Charles David Keeling conducted a vast research project which proved, once and for all, that climate change is real. In 1988, NASA scientist Jim Hansen testified before Congress, and explained it all very carefully. Denial of climate change become popular, and reached its peak just recently, where it remains. In oreder to get the entire human race involved in fighting and reversing climate change, which is now coming upon us with a fury, it would be extremely helpful for climate change denialism to fade away and vanish. A new book by New York Times writer David Lipsky "The Parrot and the Igloo", is a history of climate change denial. He traces the history of climate change denial, explaining it as a combination of sustained,deliberate corporate advertising propaganda campaigns, and poltiical leaders who,buying into the false narrative, further influenced voters to not take the matter seriously. To this day fossil fuel companies downplay and distort the facts about their industry's impact on the planet. Conseervatives often cite the transition from the term "global warming" to "climate change", which has slowly taken place over the years, as proof that the whole thing is a liberal hoax; in fact, it was conservative who brought about the change in terminology, believing that the term "climate change" sounded less drastic, less harmful, and more natural than the alarming sounding "global warming". Conservatives are the climate change deniers, largely because admitting that cimate change is real would require them to support fundamental changes in our economic and political systems to reverse it, change which we absolutely must make, such as abandoning our fossil fuel economy. When I tell people that anybody who took chemistry in high school can understand the reality of climate change, which is true,I don't seem to have much success convincing people. Simply explaining the basic chemistry of carbon in the air absorbing heat doesn't seem to work either. Sometimes it almost seems that the climate deniers are impervious to science, reason and common sense. Climate change deniers are pretty deeply dug in, entrenched agaisnt reason, fighting off scientific reallity firecely. Convincing conservatives that Trump did not win the election, that sharing wealth will not destroy America,and that climate change is real, is here, and will soon destroy us if we don't do somethng will be extremely hard, but somehow, it must be done.