Convincing Climate Change Deniers
Anthropogenic climate change, or human-caused climate change, has been studied since 1896. It’s no longer a debate whether it’s happening or not — the science is clear. For so many of you, I am preaching to the choir.
What is a frustratingly pervasive issue is combating the deniers. If you’re like me, you’ve tried many approaches:
- Busting out the graphs
- Citing scientific consensus
- Suggesting small actions to take to help the cause, many of which will help save money
- Showing the economic opportunities available to those who work in the renewable sector and who find solutions to our dirtiest sources of energy
If you’ve come up empty-handed, I’ve got one more approach. Focus on what you can see. And what we can see is undeniable and impacts all of us in a destructive feedback loop.
I’m talking about pollution and its effects. Let’s take a step back to this fundamental we started to learn about in elementary school that has somehow become buried in the climate change marketing department. Use these basic facts to weave an argument that makes it personal. We’ve got to make it personal.
Air Pollution
Whether we’re talking about smog and soot, or mercury and benzene, or greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane, it demonstrably makes our lives worse in the here and now, on top of contributing to human-caused climate change. Direct impacts include respiratory problems, heart disease, and lung cancer.
Water Pollution
There’s no way around it: You are made mostly of water. You will die without access to clean sources of it. Providing a continuous stream of clean water to your home is increasingly becoming more difficult and more expensive. It’s even possible that in the not-too-distant future, a global clean water crisis will create global disruptions as more and more humans compete for fewer and fewer sources of clean water.
Consider the Gulf of Mexico. In just the last few decades, it has become polluted to a point where an 8,000-mile hypoxic zone was created after rainfall washed tons of fertilizer and sewage water out to sea. Between fossil fuel extraction, agriculture, and factory farms, we’re getting a double whammy: Anthropogenic climate change contributions and a less and less habitable ocean. And the less habitable the oceans, the less habitable earth is for humans.
Loss of Economic Edge
Now is the time innovate in renewable energy. Trillions of dollars in economic activity lie in wait for the entities that invest, innovate, and make available greener and more efficient solutions to everyday life. While fossil fuels will not be 100% left behind, they will take a back seat. It is time for the people to let the government do what it is great at: Providing initial investment in research and development, and then letting private entities run with the rest. The result is going to be a widely available industry supplying millions of jobs.
