By Jim Edwards
We’re past the time to “debate” climate change, it’s real – and it’s a problem. We need Congress focused on bi-partisan solutions for addressing it.
We need to be solving it so we can live in a stable climate and not enduring the climate-driven extreme weather events – wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, and the resulting low flows and warming water temps in our rivers and reservoirs. 2023 was the hottest year since records have been kept and 2024 is likely to beat it. Besides rising global temperatures, we’re seeing all sorts of other negative impacts, like more frequent and extreme droughts, floods, and severe, dangerous storms.
However, since the “debate” seems to keep cropping up, I’d like to remind my fellow Montanans that there is overwhelming consensus within the scientific community on these fundamental points regarding human-induced climate change:
- Earth’s global average temperature is increasing;
- Due to our burning of fossil fuels, human emissions of greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), are the main cause of the warming;
- International, independently derived research results ALL pointing towards the same finding provide a high degree of confidence that climate scientists are on the right track. The scientific community continues to add new findings and knows that many details about climate interactions aren’t fully understood and require significant, additional, continued research.
Climate defines the range in temperature and precipitation patterns making up our weather. Since the 1800s, the climate has warmed. Since World War II, the dominant contributor has been the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas. All contain carbon. When burned, they emit potent gases, mostly CO2, into the atmosphere. These emissions act like a down blanket wrapped around the Earth, trapping the sun’s heat and thus raising temperatures, and creating droughts. As more water evaporates into the atmosphere, it provides fuel for storms and more intense rainfall.
Nearly 100 percent of climate scientists are now convinced, based on the evidence, that human-caused global warming is happening. Still, the general public perceives there is significant “debate” among scientists – why?
A campaign of obfuscation regarding climate change science has been underway since the late 1980s, funded in large part by the fossil fuels industry (quite similar to what the tobacco industry did 30 years earlier regarding the correlation of tobacco use and cancer prevalence).
In the early 1990s, the Western Fuels Association (with funding from Exxon and others), conducted a massive PR campaign to “reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)”, using dissenting scientists (industry funded), to create the impression of ongoing scientific debate.
My brother spent 40 years as an engineer working in the coal side of ExxonMobil (Exxon is now 100% divested of its coal portfolio). He’s helped educate me to the fact that for the first 30 years of his career, Exxon was invested in climate change denial; within the past 15 years, Exxon has pivoted and is now fully on board with the Paris Climate Agreement.
Scientists do not disagree about whether climate change is human-caused. There are only a very few, and even fewer with scientific backgrounds relevant to climate science, who promote “debate”. Many individuals who pose as “experts” in media sources are not scientists at all, or else have no real background in actual climate science.
People from all walks of life and all political stripes care about climate change and want to see the problem fixed as soon as possible.
To leave a healthy, stable world for future generations, we need to act now, get creative, and work energetically together. For solutions, please see https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
Jim Edwards
Member of the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL)
Jim founded Mountain West Benefits (MWB) consultancy in 2003. MWB provided health insurance advisory services and was Montana’s largest benefit consultancy firm, advising large employer, association and union sponsored plans covering over 35,000 individuals.
In 2012 Jim and his partner, Richard Miltenberger, founded the Montana Health Co-op (now Mountain Health Co-op). Jim sold MWB to the Leavitt Group in 2015 and retired in 2017. Jim and his wife Sheila have four ordinary adult children and three brilliant grandchildren.