Let’s Get Our Facts Right About Climate Change
A rant about how the debate around climate change ignores practicality.
The climate is changing. I am not interpreting observations and facts to fit the narrative. The climate really is changing. It’s a change that has happened over the course of Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history. In fact, the first mass extinction that our planet saw was the rapid spread of cyanobacteria which reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide and released the first free oxygen molecules into our atmosphere. Our hot, boiling planet of the distant past experienced global cooling and an oxygen-enriched air, which essentially paved the path to life, as we know it. Climate change happens, it always has, it always will. Nature doesn’t bend to the whims and fancies of anyone. It obeys its own laws.
There is the popular Gaia hypothesis which essentially guesstimates how the Earth is “a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system.” At any point in time, nature will pluck us out like a bad case of fleas. This is where the climate change debate of the current times steps in.
Climate changes but never this rapidly.
That’s our problem. Our activities on the planet are causing a process older than time to kick its speed up a notch. To the planet, the environment, the climate, this phenomenon doesn’t matter. To life on earth, it does; it really does.
There is no greater threat facing life on earth today than rapidly occurring climate change because of erroneous manmade activities. Maybe asteroids falling from the sky could top the list, but that’s something that we cannot do anything about. With climate change, we can try to undo the damage we have inflicted on the planet. We need to save our environment otherwise it will leave us burning in the ashes of a fire that we started.
To quote George Carlin, “Save the planet-The planet has been through a lot worse than us. The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! The planet will be here and we’ll be long gone and it will heal and cleanse itself.”
The planet will be fine, we most certainly won’t.
The Amazonian rainforest is home to 10% of all the discovered species on the planet. It contains so many trees that it’s called the ‘Lungs of the Earth’. Surprisingly, between 2004 and 2012, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest went down by 84%. Native tribes fought legal as well as on-ground battles with their governments and people from massive corporations and won. In 2018 though, deforestation made a comeback jumping up to 13.7% which amounts to 1.2 billion trees. Then the likes of Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil and the deforestation percentage spiked up rapidly as land was cleared for development projects. The lack of trees resulted in a comparatively dry climate. As a result, we saw those massive and uncontrollable wildfires that burned away chunks of these ancient forests. Instead of doing simple, effective things like using primitive techniques to replant forests and not create too much nondegradable waste, we politicised the entire climate change debate.
The left firmly believes in climate change while the right doesn’t. While we are busy fighting each other using caustic rhetoric and scientific studies, we forget that cherry picking of science is not located in one political spectrum. Climate change exists. That debate needs to stop because we cannot stop the climate from changing. Stop using Norman Davies’s Second Rule of Propaganda, which states, “The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.” Shouting at the other side, whichever side it may be, making them feel like an absolute nincompoop doesn’t do anything for society or the environment.
I am so absolutely over this herd mentality surrounding teams. I am ‘for the environment’, I am ‘not’. It creates this insidious us versus them phenomenon which turns into a what I believe versus what you believe fight and then we’ll be stuck, fighting one another while our world rapidly burns around us.
I suggest walking the road not taken. Do what people like Sebastião Salgado, Prabha Devi and Moirangthem Loiya do. They are bringing forests back to life by replanting patches of land, one day at a time. Collect fruit seeds and throw them on patches of barren soil. That’s how easily trees grow. Go green and waste free like Japan has. These are choices that you and I can easily make. Stop using straws and directly drink from the glass. Is it that hard people?
I strongly disagree that if we become smarter, our problems become easier. This intelligence we seem to possess makes us believe we are better than we really are. We are not. We are one of the many life forms that live on this magnanimous planet. The day we push it to the brink, it will clean us out. Let’s just get our facts right and stop pressing that self-destruct button, shall we?
Also, the climate is changing, it always does. Why aren’t we?
