The foolishness of Trump’s science denial is unacceptable. Teenagers that many teachers work with have a better understanding of science than Trump. They know the earth’s atmosphere is heating up. Most of them are living on the hottest earth in more than 100 years. Teenagers know in their short lifetime that hurricanes, flooding, drought conditions, and fires are commonplace. They also have led one of the largest climate crises protests in the world.
Kip Ault,[1] in his book Beyond Science Standards, provides detailed examples of how elementary through high school students use a variety of tools to study weather and atmospheric patterns to understand the nature of climate science. The research that students he describes are doing is like research done by EPA scientists.
Climate Denial
One of the most serious problems that we face, in the context of climate change, are those deniers that distort climatology to support their political and economic views. For example, some researchers have commented that climate change science has been distorted, and at the same time science is evoked as a defense. They describe how a handful of scientists obscured the truth, not only about climate change, but issues related to tobacco and vaccines. As they point out, the climate change deniers use the same “play book” that big tobacco firms used to try to convince the public that smoking tobacco was not associated with cancer.[2]
The chief denier is Donald Trump, along with a slew of Republicans in the Congress, who claim that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Trump and associates claim that the Accords will undermine the US economy. Yet at the same time, denying that global warming is undermining and changing environments throughout the earth.
Addressing climate change stagnated during the Trump administration. On many occasions, Trump refused to accept pleas from scientists, governors and natural resources officials that increasing air and ocean temperatures were driving hurricanes, superstorms, and the ravaging fires, especially in California, but also many other western states.
The Trump administration refused to acknowledge the facts that show how temperature rise has resulted in rising sea levels, melting of glaciers, flooding of coastal cities, increasing number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes that reach land, and more serious canopy fires. Canopy fires are fires which burn to the tops of trees. Some of these wildfires are so big, they create their own weather. Wind patterns can change, but more dangerous are low pressures that are created around the fire, allowing air to rush in and create fire-induced winds. Fire tornadoes and fire clouds (pyrocumulonimbus clouds) can be formed by fire induced winds.[3]
The EPA released a climate report[4] in May 2021 that was hidden or delayed by the Trump administration. This was not surprising given the rebuke of science by Trump. The last time a climate report was released by the EPA was in 2016. The climate report, according to law, is published every four years. So, visiting the EPA climate change indicators page was refreshing. EPA scientists, who did the work three years earlier, finally had their work published and available to the American public. I recommend visiting this page which will provide you with interesting graphics and tools to give you an opportunity to learn how the indicators of climate change are analyzed and used to make predictions and foretell what we need to do to lessen the effect of climate change.
During Trump’s time in office, the effects of climate change were stunning, yet ignored by his administration. Hurricanes, flooding, and fires caused billions of dollars in damages and human loss that was staggering. Much of the human suffering has disproportionally affected Black, Indigenous and people of color.
Climate change is also a driving force in Central American migration. Trump treated woman and children who approached the U.S. border inhumanely, many of whom traveled more than 2,000 miles (about twice the distance from Florida to New York City) on foot. Researchers have documented that “climate displacement” is especially prevalent in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, also known as the Northern Triangle. These countries have experienced climate-related impacts including food insecurity, recurring droughts, decline in agricultural production, increase vulnerability to disease and water scarcity. Experts predict that climate change will displace up to 3.9 million people (about twice the population of New Mexico) across Mexico and Central America by 2050.[5]
Climate Generation
Sarah Jaquette Ray, in her book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety,[6] explains that we are the “climate generation” and we live in the Anthropocene, a geological age marked by the way humans have affected the climate and environment in irreversible ways. In an article published in Scientific American, she points out that climate anxiety is overwhelmingly a white phenomenon. She says that white response to climate change is suffocating to people of color. To her, climate anxiety operates like white fragility, sucking up all the resources toward soothing the dominant group. The migrants coming to the Southern border were labeled by Trump as rapists, criminals, and drug dealers. We know these characterizations are not true.
In her Field Guide, Ray incorporates the idea of “resilience” as the best condition for thriving in a climate-changed world. She says this about “resilience:”
Resilience must be advocated for in culturally sensitive ways, with acknowledgement that the crises of environmental change have been impacting indigenous peoples around the globe since the age of expansion, beginning as early as the fifteenth century. Climate change is not an impending future crisis. It is an extension of ongoing extinctions, destabilization, and rapid environmental transformation. We should resist crisis narratives for the reasons I have presented in this book, but also because they perpetuate the erasure of these legacies.[7]
Empty Words
Climate grief, a feeling of despair, anxiety or fear that causes people to feel helpless and overwhelmed has impacted the lives of our youth. As mentioned earlier, Greta Thunberg cut school on a Friday and sat in front of the Parliament Building in Stockholm. This action inspired millions of teenagers around the world to join her in an international movement to protest governments to do something about climate change. Teenagers joined her to strike from school on Fridays and to organize rallies and conferences on climate change.
However, even though governments and organizations invite teenagers to conferences and meetings, there are questions about the motivation for these gatherings. Greta Thunberg recently challenged the adults who organized a conference in Milan, Italy, in September 2021 a month before the COP26 meeting in Glasgow. The COP26 is United Nations 26th Climate Change conference.
The conference in Milan, Youth4Climate: Driving Ambition and Pre-COP26 brought together 400 youth from 197 member countries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This conference was a follow-on conference preceded by nine #Youth4ClimateLive Series of interactive virtual episodes covering a wide range of climate topics.
For several years the world’s youth have protested and marched to speak out and act against government’s lack of action on climate change. Greta Thunberg is one of the most decisive and esteemed leaders among the youth of the world. At the conference in Milan, she ripped into adult leadership and asserted that they have done nothing but “blah, blah, blah” for the past 30 years.[8] She said the leaders of this conference cherry pick attendees and “pretend they are listening to us, but they are not.” At stake is bringing the warming of the planet under control, which means preventing a temperature increase of no more than 1.5C.
According to Dr. Katja Frieler,[9] at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, to remove the burden and lessen the grief experienced by children and youth, we need to phase out fossil fuel use. If this is done, then planetary warming will be limited to 1.5C.
[1] Ault, C.R., Jr. (2021). Beyond Science Standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
[2] Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of doubt.
[3] Simon, M. (2020, August 21). California wildfires can create their own terrifying weather. Retrieved May 21, 2021, from https://www.wired.com/story/california-wildfires-can-create-terrifying-weather/
[4] Environmental Protection Agency. (2021, May 3). Climate Change Indicators in the United States. EPA. https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators.
[5] Human Rights Network. (2021). Climate change and displaced persons. Retrieved April 24, 2021, from https://www.humanrightsnetwork.org/climate-change-and-displaced-persons
[6] Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety.
[7] Ibid., 140-141.
[8] Jewkes, S., & Piovaccari, G. (2021, September 28). ‘30 years of Blah Blah Blah’: Thunberg questions italy climate talks. Reuters. Retrieved September 29, 2021, from https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/protests-proposals-activists-face-climate-talks-test-2021-09-28/.
[9] Katja Frieler is IPCC lead author for Key Risks Across Sectors and Regions in the 6th Assessment Report of Working Group 2. She has published more than 70 peer-reviewed articles on climate change and was named Highly Cited Researcher in 2020.
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