In the last couple of years, climate change and its implications have become a part of mainstream conversations all around the world. The phrase Climate Emergency was even chosen as the Oxford word of the year in 2019. As the discussions around the changing weather pattern, frequent natural disasters, rising sea levels, and global warming, increase, more and more people want to understand and know the truth about the rampant anxiety regarding climate change. This has also led to a lot of confusion and an obvious divide among common people.
A lot of us are still in denial and strongly believe that climate change is just a hoax, propaganda used by politicians to earn votes, or is a fake science! Even the literature is rife with such deniers. In one his novels called State of Fear, Michael Crichton, late American author, even tried misleading its readers, claiming that global warming is just a false alarm and humanity is not at the verge of any mass destruction! World leaders such as the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, has outrightly rejected the entire climate science and has called it a hoax. Moreover, he intends to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement. Another politician, Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, a South American country, too denied any climate change and since taking up his office in 2019, he has aggressively promoted deforestation in Amazon rainforest. There is a second set of people too who believe that climate change implications mitigation is the sole responsibility of the politicians and fossil fuel-guzzling corporates. They fail to understand that all of us need to contribute to climate change action and at this eleventh hour, each of us needs to do our bit to tackle the issue before it gets too late.
There have been a number of climate change myths floating around globally. Many argue that climate change is just a natural phenomenon as it has always been and climate has changed several times in Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history. However, what they fail to comprehend is that the rate at which the present changes have occurred in last 150 years, since the advent of Industrial revolution, is far rapid and now the changes which usually happened in over half a million years are taking place within a decade! Some animals and plants can adapt but many will get extinct. Others think that global warming is a thing of future and our generation would not have to face any consequences. They can not be any further from the truth. International organisations like the United Nations have even sounded an alarm declaring that we might have just eleven-twelve more years to take actions if we want to restrict near future catastrophic events! Further, there is a lot of resistance from people embracing renewable sources of energy as there is a prevalent opinion among them that “renewable energy is more expensive” than the fossil fuels, and it is just another money-making scheme. There is still a lack of awareness that the prices of renewable energy have been falling rapidly and with new innovations, it will only get cheaper in days to come.
Whatever the present sentiments are, the good news is that talk around climate change has exponentially increased in the last few years and more and more people are questioning, arguing, exploring and voicing their concerns regarding climate change than ever.
