Climate Change Apathy Needs To Stop

Climate Change is one of the biggest issues (if not the biggest) in the modern world, and the fact that many people still believe it is a hoax is baffling to me. Even with the wildfires that have caused severe damage all around the world, the large storms that have battered many parts of the world, and with the other clear effects that are continuing to show themselves, there are still countless people saying that climate change isn’t a concern.

Today, many major oil companies continue to fund lobbying against climate change rules. As early as the 1960’s, ExxonMobil was aware of the effects of their oil emissions. According to Yale, More than $2 billion was spent on lobbying climate change legislation in the United States from 2000 to 2016. This money is spent on convincing those who make the rules that they should not pass policies to limit them.

In the Antarctic, ice layers have formed over the course of the past 600,000 years. As the new ice froze, it froze information with it. Each layer trapped CO₂ and other gases that now can be used to tell us information about the planets past. According to multiple scientific papers, we can easily deduce from this that current CO₂ concentrations are higher than they have been for over 600,000 years.

I recently watched former Vice President Al Gore's acclaimed documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The film, which was released in 2006, highlighted the effects of climate change. Even 14 years ago, scientists already knew this data from the Antarctic and observed how much temperatures increased. At the end, Gore highlighted the different ways to fight climate change. At the time, switching to more sustainable devices and using less energy was a solution.

But today, this isn’t enough. 2019 was the second hottest year on record 2018. Berkeley Earth makes it clear how we have done little to nothing to decrease temperatures since 2005. In fact, the temperatures have just continued to go up.

Today, the only option is to make real change. If we had started 10 years ago, we may have had a chance to do this easily, but now it is too late. Still, people don’t seem to be bothered. There are immense quantities of scientific evidence and there have even been real-world examples of the effects of climate change but today, a third of Americans are still either not very interested in climate change or not at all interested. It is hard to tell why these people aren’t very interested in climate change, but one thing is clear. This needs to stop!