The Changing Climate

THE SECRET to getting long with Trump supporters is avoiding political discussions with them. By now, millions of people have either figured that out, or acquired the habit of avoiding Trump supporters altogether. The best way to get along with climate change deniers, who generally tend to be the same people who support Trump, is probably to never mention climate change to them. The last person I mentioned it to, a good friend of mine who is also a Trump supporter with whom I never discuss politics, looked at me dismissively and said, "You don't really believe in that stuff, do you?", as if belief in climate change were tantamount to some superstitious nonsense, which to them, it is. At some point, however, somebody must find a way to educate and elucidate climate deniers, for the benefit of human climate cooperation; so far, nobody seems to ahve accomplished that lofty goal. Deniers, at long last, have largely given up on the argument that climate chage is a hoax perpetrated by the liberal media or politicians looking to increase government power in our lives. That argument, in context with the reality that most people accept climate change as observable fact, including everyone who understands science, has become silly to the point of sounding ridiculous, which it indeed is. Most people have heard the current climate denier argument of choice: that the climate changes all the time, naturally, or that it changes often, naturally, and is has nothing to do with human activity. Climate scientist Michael Mann has probably heard this argument more than most of us, so he decided to do something about it. He wrote a book , titled "Our Fragile Moment", about the history of cimate change, going back millions of years. The conservaives who use the natural climate change argument, as if this fact somehow prevents human beings from impacting the climate, lack a basic understanding of science, and their stating of the obvious fact that the cimate changes naturally seems to imply that they think they have something to teach about science, as if they are sharing a revelation. We already know that the cliamte changes by itself. Not only that, we know quite a bit, through science, about when the changes have occured, and what caused them. Michael Mann discusses all the major changes, bringing us up to date with the most recent natural change, in about 1850, when the roughly three hundred year "Little Ice Age" came to an end, and winters in North America became far less brutal than they had been throughout the entire American colonial period. We also know a great deal about current climate change, and the direct causal relationship of human industral activity, pouring billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, which we are still very much still doing, alarmingly. Michael Mann's monograph is written in scientific language, and at times can seem rather dense to lay people, but he makes his central point quite effectively ; that we already know that the climate changes of its own accord, but that this natural climate change in no way prevents humans from having their own impact on the climate, which we are now in the process of doing, dangerously. Michael Mann helps us draw lessons about adaptability from climate change history, and his narrative gives us hope, that through our adaptive capabilities, by changing our habits, and by using technology available to us now, we can sufficiently mitigate future climate change to preserve a habitable planet for our descendants. Referring to this excellent scientific work is a good way of responding to the denier's lame natural climate change argument by simply saying: "I already knew that".