Let's Talk About Climate Change: How Acknowledging out Views Can Let Us Proceed

Last weekend, I sat in my basement as pouring rain pounded on the roof and the sound of thunder and lightning echoed through the sky. Like many Lawrentians, I refreshed the weather app on loop and listened to the weather channel’s breakdown on my laptop. Luckily, Lawrenceville avoided the major damage caused by the seven tornadoes that struck New Jersey last Saturday. 

However, New Jersey never used to get tornadoes. The state holds an average of two tornadoes per year, and they traditionally only cause minor damages. As a New Jerseyan myself, I have never participated in a tornado drill at school. Yet, my hometown of Cranbury, NJ, received two tornado warnings last year, one of which knocked down several telephone poles and trees. Although the tornados only caused comparatively minor damages, the fact we were suddenly receiving tornado warnings created panic in my town. We weren’t ready. My historic town didn’t have the infrastructure that could endure major storms or hurricanes because we had seldom experienced them before. 

But this year, areas across America have experienced more severe weather than usual. Snow storms in Southern California, ice storms in Texas, extreme heat waves in the Midwest, and the ridiculous amount of snow in Buffalo, NY, are footnotes in the neverending list of weather anomalies attributable to climate change. Attribution scientists have determined that earth’s rising temperatures cause more water to evaporate, systematically increasing the severity of storms. With floods, tornadoes, or ice storms making headlines almost every week, climate change is outpacing the infrastructure that defends us against the weather.

 Given that, the question is: What are we doing to combat climate change? For an issue so fundamentally important as preserving our world, one might expect global powers to take major steps toward a solution. Yet, climate change has become such a politically divisive issue that America cannot effectively mitigate it. Climate change has become a partisan issue, heavily associated with one side of America’s political spectrum. This assumption leads us to believe that only around 50 percent of Americans support climate change policy. However, Bernadette Woods Placky, Chief Meteorologist and Director of Climate Matters Program, cited a different statistic at her Capstone lecture a few weeks ago. A CNBC poll that found over 80 percent of Americans believed that climate change was a major issue—a strong majority. Despite the sample’s views on climate change, only 40 percent of the sampled Americans believed other people saw climate change as a major issue. Americans think climate change is controversial, but in reality, a vast majority recognize its threat to our world. Our main obstacle in the climate fight is our own misjudgements of support.

With this in mind, the question remains the same: What are we doing? The answer is we are not doing enough as a collective since we are not working together. Every person needs to act as though climate change is not a politically charged issue, because it isn’t. It is a scientific phenomenon that affects the entire world’s future. A global issue such as climate change can only be solved by amending public policy on a global scale. However, America has bogged down in proving the legitimacy of climate change, preventing us from incorporating changes to our public policy. After all the recent severe weather, it is becoming clear how dangerous climate change will become if left unchecked. The longer we wait to commit to some sort of action, the more climate change will worsen. Like it or not, climate change is visibly changing our world, and our hesitation to speak about climate change only exacerbates its effects. We should not fear talking about climate change. By acknowledging our agreement on climate change as an American people, legislative action will finally become possible. If we don’t speak as a collective body, one united for climate action, nothing will be accomplished. The storms we have seen every week on the news will only become worse. We must recognize our unity and support one another to protect our future.