This is an opinion column.
Disrespect for science is epidemic. Pandemic. Endemic.
We can’t even convince people to take a vaccine to protect themselves and their families from a highly infectious and too often deadly virus.
How the hell are we gonna save the world?
It’s not debatable anymore. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was grim and clear in its vast report last week, as U.N. Secretary General António Guterres issued a “code red for humanity.”
We can’t mess around. It is unequivocal now, according to the report, that humans are the principal driver of climate change. Humans – that’s us, for the most part -- must act if the world is to have a shot at healing itself. It’s already too late to save some species, and communities. We’ve poured too much carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, warming it like a hot bath to soothe our denial.
There’s still a lot we can do. The report is clear on that. There’s still a lot we must do. If only we would listen to the best scientific minds in the world.
But politics and profit has turned the existential threat into a partisan talking point. Which is its own death sentence.
Scientists across the globe have long warned us, but politicians hungry for energy money and votes have long dismissed them, ridiculing experts to tell constituents they need to change nothing. That message has been clear: Climate change is a hoax by wackos, a leftist plot, a scheme by outsiders, a Chicken Little fable.
But in the meantime air and water and earth have warmed, species have died, and more are threatened. The earth has seen climate changes unprecedented for thousands of years. It shows up in heat waves and heavy rains, droughts and storms. Now scientists across the globe beg us to listen. Parts of this continent could see temps rise 7 degrees in winter and more than 5 in summer, the report says. Soil moisture could decrease, fuel, food, medicine, building materials could become scarcer as ecosystems change. We can’t be paralyzed by fear. Or politics.
“We owe this to the entire human family,” Guterres said in a statement. “There is no time for delay and no room for excuses.”
The report lays out a pathway for progress. But how is it to work when politicians poo-poo science for their own profit?
Alabama politicians have only stood in the way of solutions. They’ve spent years casting doubt, with delays and excuses. In the process they put our futures in doubt, too.
“There have been new findings that clearly show the science is not settled on climate change,” Congressman Gary Palmer’s office said in 2016. Even though it was pretty settled by then.
“I fall into the second group of people who believe, as do many very credible scientists, that the earth is currently in a natural warming cycle rather than a man-made climate change,” Congressman Robert Aderholt said more than once over the last decade.
Alabama Public Service Commissioner Twinkle Cavanaugh has made a career of denying science, of disregarding climate research as the work of “environmental extremists.”
“When in doubt, burn coal,” she told the State News Agency (Yellowhammer) just this year. “That’s what I always say. God put more than two centuries worth of coal in the ground for a reason.”
If it’s there, consume it. Like locusts. And blame it on God.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville – when campaigning for that office in coal-rich Jasper – did that too.
“There is one person that changes this climate in this country and that is God. OK?” Tuberville said.
Of course Congressman Mo Brooks famously suggested in a House committee that rocks – not climate change – were the cause of sea level rise.
“Every time you have that soil or rock, whatever it is, that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise because now you’ve got less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up,” he said.
Science has identified the problem. Science has shown us a path. Conservative politicians -- as if it is somehow conservative to oppose conservation of the earth -- have repeatedly stood in the way.
They have to change. Or everything will.
John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for AL.com. His work appears in the Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times and the Mobile Press-Register.
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August 12, 2021 at 06:49PM
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Archibald: Science can save us; politics won’t - AL.com
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