While I find that it is always an appropriate time to talk about climate change and what we can do in the face of it, I find it especially imperative currently as some huge milestones have been set over the last few weeks regarding the subject, and yet, there are still members of the corporate media denying its legitimacy to potentially fatal ends. One of the sources of those milestones, Hurricane Matthew, has caused some infamous climate deniers Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh to actually encourage people in the crosshairs of the storm to ignore dire warnings from government officials to evacuate, claiming that the seriousness of the storm is overblown and being used as liberal propaganda.
As of this writing, Hurricane Matthew is threatening to most likely decimate certain coastal areas of the Southeastern United States. Before even making landfall in the United States, it has already broken a number of records for hurricanes and it is also occurring extremely late in the season, which only adds to the fear of climate change's potential for future catastrophic events.
This storm comes on the heels of the announcement made by climate scientists that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) have surpassed 400 parts per million (PPM) permanently and that we will never again see a month below that level in our lifetimes. This is particularly horrifying due to the fact that climate scientist have been warning us for years that we must absolutely stay below that threshold in order to prevent runaway climate change.
Yet unfortunately, despite consistently hotter temperatures and the increase of rare and devastating storms over the past decade or so, a surprisingly large percentage of the population still either doubts that climate change is occurring, that it is a result of fossil fuel emotions, or is an issue to be taken seriously. It is also frighteningly an absent topic in the presidential race.
A large part of the confusion comes from the massive amounts of information available these days from all different types of sources (not to mention the downright deception coming from some of those sources). It can be easy to feel overwhelmed and can often be difficult to decipher between fact and fiction. Because of this, I would like to present you with just two irrefutable facts that are accepted by essentially everyone and prove the existence of man-made climate change.
1. Venus, not Mercury, is the hottest planet in the solar system.
Stay with me for a minute if you will. I realize that I'm talking about entirely different planets, but I promise, it will all come together in the end.
I bring up Venus for two reasons. First of all, you would be very hard-pressed to find a scientist who disagrees that it is the hottest planet in the solar system. We know this unequivocally and have for some time now. The reason this is generally accepted is due to the large percentage of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, 96.5% to be exact. Because of all the carbon dioxide present - a gas that has been known to cause a greenhouse effect to atmospheres for over a century now - Venus is actually much hotter than Mercury, which is significantly closer to the sun, yet only has trace amounts of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. All of this is important to understand because scientific principals are consistent and therefore applicable, to the best of our knowledge, throughout the universe.
2. There is more carbon dioxide in the air than ever before in human history.
As I mentioned before, we have passed the 400 PPM mark for CO2 for the first time in human history, we are not going back, and we continue to add more to the atmosphere. If this was a recent benchmark we just passed, things might be a little less concerning, but we have actually been at record levels of atmospheric CO2 for a few years now. Believe it or not, this too is actually generally accepted.
Even Rush Limbaugh, who Media Matters crowned their 2011 Climate Change Denier of the Year, has admitted that humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere. In an April 2013 episode of his radio show, Limbaugh admitted to the fact that increased emissions were indeed taking place to a degree that may affect the climate. (He went on to wrongly theorize that they were actually having a cooling effect on the climate, but addressing dishonest like his is the point of this article). Due to these increased levels, it only seems natural that we would see similar consequences as those on Venus, not the opposite.
So there you have it. Once again, these are two widely accepted facts, yet they are unfortunately too rarely connected. My hope is that we can put this debate behind us, accept reality, and begin to work towards solutions. As in the case of those in the path of massive storms such as Hurricane Matthew, lives are literally at stake.
