Opinion: Climate change denial puts us all in danger

“The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.” — Chief Seattle

As I got up to work in the garden on a recent Sunday morning there was an air quality warning because the smoke from Canadian forest fires was wafting over the area. I couldn’t see the hillside less than a quarter mile away. There are those who say that these wildfires are not the result of climate change and that is the problem, there is no clear direct evidence connecting climate change to Canadian forest fires, but that does not mean they are not connected.

Last month’s catastrophic flooding in Texas was the worst that has been seen, but one cannot say there is a cause and effect relationship with climate change there either. Of course if Texas state officials had agreed to help Kerr County pay for the installation of a warning system fewer people might have died.

The Trump administration is among the loudest of voices denying the climate change connection to such events. Cuts to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service staffing and research capabilities are hindering the nation’s ability to prepare for and respond effectively to extreme weather events. The administration has targeted NOAA efforts to research climate change.

The departure of the United States from the Paris Accord and the attempts to delete all mentions of climate change from government websites doesn’t alter the fact that climate change exists and that we should work to minimize our greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to make our buildings more resilient.

One has only to look at the fires, droughts and floods that we have seen in just the last year in places we have never seen them before to see that we need to plan better for the changes in the weather. The plan to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency when we have more disasters every year seems shortsighted.

Global warming causes ice to melt at the poles and in the mountains where glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate. There are places in the world that rely on summer melting of glaciers for their water. When the glaciers are gone they will lose that precious resource. As the oceans warm, the water expands and takes up more space which leads to even higher water levels leading to more flooding.

The irony is we do have some of the tools we need to help slow if not eliminate climate change. With the improvements in glazing, insulation, heat pumps and renewable energy since the 1980s, a zero energy house is an achievable possibility though many builders don’t know how to reach such lofty goals.

We must ask ourselves, is it necessary to make a business case for doing things that reduce our emissions and increase our buildings’ resilience? It would seem that we must.

In a landmark ruling, the International Court of Justice declared that failure to act on climate change can be an “internationally wrongful act”—meaning countries could face legal consequences for harming the planet.

Unfortunately the world’s biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas implicated as a major cause of climate change, China, Russia and the United States do not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice so little can be expected from this ruling.

One of the little known problems of rising CO2 levels is the acidification of the oceans. When CO2 falls into the water it becomes carbonic acid. Plankton, which supplies a large percentage of the world’s oxygen,  has calcium carbonate shells and the rising acidity is dissolving their shells threatening their ability to survive. All calcium-shelled organisms are threatened by the acidification of our oceans so clams, oysters, mussels, corals, crabs, snails and lobsters are at risk.

Climate change has also decimated insect populations. Insects are a vitally important part of the ecosystems of the world. They pollinate flowers and help to get rid of dying matter. If they disappear our whole agricultural system could collapse.

The solutions to reducing emissions to attempt to reverse the effects of climate change abound. Those efforts create jobs and reduce costs, but this administration does not want the facts to emerge while it promotes “clean coal.”

To quote Kurt Vonnegut; “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”

This is a contributed opinion column. Bruce Wilson is a project developer for GEMM Masterplanning, a company that helps commercial building owners make cost-effective sustainable solutions. The views expressed in this piece are those of its individual author, and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of this publication. Do you have a perspective to share? Learn more about how we handle guest opinion submissions at themorningcall.com/opinions.