Why Climate Change Is Not a Hoax

We humans are programmed to respond to dangers apparent and immediate, but the long term, the incipient, and to our eyes invisible elude us.  Climate change evidenced as global warming falls in this elusive category.  It is for this reason demagogues and fossil fuel interests can continue to deny or minimize the dangers so clearly presented in the latest Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released on October 8, 2018.

The articles in this handbook furnish conclusive evidence of climate change and its effects.  Unabated, it will devastate life on the planet.  As it is extreme weather events have worsened in intensity in recent years causing loss of life and billions of dollars in property damage.  Floods that happened once in a hundred years can be expected to occur once in 50 or 25 years.  Low-lying countries are already experiencing partial inundation through rising sea levels.  These could disappear completely. 

The principal greenhouse gas culprit, carbon dioxide (CO2), has reached record levels in the atmosphere exceeding 400 parts per million for the first time during the existence of modern man.  

What are we to do?  Well, the new IPCC report offers clues.  Its compromise of accepting a 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global mean temperature — somewhere between the 2C rise of the Paris agreement and the present rise above preindustrial levels — is exactly that … a compromise.  Severe weather consequences can still be expected to worsen. 

Logic then dictates the argument for the most interventionist scenarios where the atmospheric CO2 is eventually reduced.  To that end it is abundantly clear that we as individuals must continue to pressure our elected representatives to act, and to vote out those who persist in denial or inaction.

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Dr. Arshad M. Khan
Dr. Arshad M. Khan
Dr. Arshad M. Khan is a former Professor based in the US. Educated at King's College London, OSU and The University of Chicago, he has a multidisciplinary background that has frequently informed his research. Thus he headed the analysis of an innovation survey of Norway, and his work on SMEs published in major journals has been widely cited. He has for several decades also written for the press: These articles and occasional comments have appeared in print media such as The Dallas Morning News, Dawn (Pakistan), The Fort Worth Star Telegram, The Monitor, The Wall Street Journal and others. On the internet, he has written for Antiwar.com, Asia Times, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, Eurasia Review and Modern Diplomacy among many. His work has been quoted in the U.S. Congress and published in its Congressional Record.