Dr. Arthur E. Sowers of Harbeson is a retired research professor of biophysics and pathology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Polls of climatologists show that the vast majority (97%) agree that climate change is real, man-made and will be very bad for us in the future.
On the other hand, climate deniers still say things like, “So what?” and “We don’t need to do anything,” and “It is not man-made,” and “It has been hotter in the past.”
A number of Delaware State News opinion pieces have come out against fighting climate change, based on the one-sided story that the fight would hurt the economy. But they never say a peep about all the new jobs that battling climate change would create.
Another anti-climate initiative was announced in an internet article, titled “In DeSantis’ Florida, schools get OK for climate-denial videos.” Thus, some states are establishing censorship and propaganda. Interestingly, on the other hand, a National Public Radio internet article, titled “New Jersey requires climate change education: A year in, here’s how it’s going,” came out saying that they plan to expand the teaching of climate change in the K-12 schools. The article cited a poll that said 70%-80% of parents nationwide supported climate change teaching.
All this time, the real world was having many continent-sized and all-time record-high-temperature heat waves, extreme flooding from record rainfalls, high-wind storms and massive wildfires all over our planet. All-time record-high oceanwater temperatures were measured around Florida in July this year. One article reports that, in Argentina and Chile, the temperatures hit 100-plus in many places in July, despite it being the middle of the winter season in the Southern Hemisphere. A 2023 journal article, titled “Escalating costs of billion-dollar disasters in the US: Climate change necessitates disaster risk reduction,” showed that inflation-adjusted dollar-value climate damage increased about 20% per decade and correlated with carbon dioxide data and global temperature data. Also, in the last few years, the homeowners insurance industry has been seriously challenged by larger damage claim burdens from increased climate change-induced storms, floods and wildfires. Because of this, many insurance companies have withdrawn from California, Texas and Florida markets or parts of those markets.
An interesting thing about climate deniers came out of a Pew Research Center poll that had numbers broken down by left or right political identity. Looking at only the right, the average approval of fighting climate change in the other nine countries was 74% (range: 59%-89%). For the USA, it was a measly 45%. It looks to me like our right has a larger radicalized far right and a smaller moderate right.
Now, let’s look at the false logic used when deniers say, “It has been hotter in the past; therefore, global warming is not happening!” That is an apples-and-oranges type of mistake.
The error in logic happens when someone is thinking of a freak record-high temperature such as 134 degrees in Death Valley in 1913. Death Valley has a miniscule land area of 3,000 square miles. Sure, widespread recent heat wave temperatures of 115-120 degrees are lower than the Death Valley record. But today’s multiple, record-high, record-long and simultaneous global extreme heat waves are sweeping over much larger continent-sized land areas of 500,000-1 million square miles (e.g., America, Europe, Asia). Compare temperatures in the same and equal areas over each consecutive year to make a scientifically valid comparison.
Climate deniers in the USA generate their own denier attitudes by using an erroneous line of thinking, called the “straw man fallacy.” It works like this: You say things like mandates, regulations and other “green/renewable initiatives” represent government “overreach,” or interfere with “personal freedoms” or threaten one’s rights to some visual “viewshed” of a landscape. In the past, almost nobody said a peep about farm windmills, gaudy billboards, ugly power grid wires and towers, telephone poles and lines, radio towers and real estate subdivisions, but when windfarms and solar farms came into the picture, the deniers got stirred-up and started screaming.
Thus, the real problem of climate change damage is replaced by an inflated but less important problem (the “straw man”), distracting people from the real problem and misdirecting them to unhelpful obstructionism and protest activities.
A recent anti-electric vehicle Commentary in the Delaware State News was mostly about the fates of certain Delaware EV mandate bills, but ended with one of those it-hurts-the-economy arguments (“A requiem for the electric vehicle mandate?” Aug. 13). David R. Legates wrote, “The Delaware legislature is foolish if it thinks that the electric vehicle mandate will cause anything more than economic hardship for our citizens.” But he did not give any good explanation for how he came to that conclusion.
The straw man is the economic hardship from electric vehicle mandates. On the contrary, the real and bigger economic hardship will come from general damage caused by climate change. Think, at least, about the specific “economic hardship” effect of a 10-foot sea level rise by 2100 on the existence of Lewes and Rehoboth Beach (actually, coastal land all over the world is going to be underwater). This is a realistic sea level rise estimate from many articles I have read about how higher global temperatures will melt glacial, Greenland and Antarctica ice faster.
Finally, the subject of climate change denial is covered in a very large and detailed must-read Wikipedia entry, titled “Climate change denial.” It even covers fossil industry lobbying, litigation, oppositional public relations campaigns, climate denial networks, pseudoscience, psychology, politics, climate change skepticism promoted by right-wing think tanks, Koch money, influencers, manipulators and rhetorical tricks.
