Climate Change: Man-made or Natural Variations?
I often chuckle when people on either side of the climate change divide ponder whether the warming of the atmosphere is man-made or a natural occurrence as if humanity is somehow not part of nature. Of course, we are part of nature. We are animals native to this planet, so anything we do can be considered part of nature, like birds collecting nest-building material, bees extracting pollen to produce honey, or a beaver deforesting to construct a dam. I know what they are getting at with such statements: How different would things be if we were not here? I’m just not finding such distinctions to be helpful. We are here. We have an impact. We are very much aware of that impact. The Earth will absorb that impact and change. If we fail to change our ways, we will most soon fade away and the planet will return to those “natural” cycles without human intervention.
There have been warming and cooling cycles in Earth’s history. They have been much more gradual, occurring over hundreds of thousands of years, and have not included the drastic temperature fluctuations we are now experiencing. The video below was produced by the U.S. Natural Research Council, an operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences.
There are many reasons why people are motivated to not believe that human activity is causing climate change. In the U.S., a lot of this motivation is political. The U.S. is one of the few places on Earth where the issue of climate change is a political debate and not a scientific or policy debate, although this type of politics is quickly being exported around the world like blue jeans. Psychologists have the term “motivated inference”—when people have strong motivations to be very selective in the sort of evidence they are willing to receive. Others will say that it’s hard to agree with something if your paycheck or political position depends on you not agreeing.
It is often assumed that the best interests not only of individuals but also of governments and businesses are to refrain from taking an active role in combating the climate crisis due to the short-term expenses involved in doing so. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the cost of ignoring the climate crisis will be far worse than any short-term losses. According to a 2020 article in Nature Communications, the global economy would lose between $150-792 trillion by 2100 should countries fail to meet their current targets to cut emissions. In contrast, according to the UN Environment Programme, the total cost of adapting to the impacts of the climate crisis would be $280-500 billion per year globally by 2050. Despite this, the compulsion to value short-term benefits over those in the long term means that as the climate crisis accelerates governments are stalling.
A study by the University of Oxford found that switching to green energy would save the world $12 trillion.
Mostly, I think most Americans are attached to their image of being in the right on nearly all matters—economically, politically, morally, spiritually, etc. We are not really interested, for the most part, in revisiting ways in which our prosperity and way of life were made possible by slavery, our treatment of indigenous peoples, our debt-based banking system (actually the world banking system), and, of course, our industrial consumer society.
