Climate Change Hysteria

By Isabella Doherty, Features Editor

GUSTAVE DEGHILAGE/ Flickr

According to a recent report from the United Nations, Earth only has 12 years to take action to prevent the worst aspects anticipated from climate change. As a collective, humanity has 12 years to make an impact before the world is quite literally toast. However, this generated hysteria could just be yet another in the great line in the 50 years of failed eco-apocalyptic predictions. In order to have people fully committed to the issue at hand, there needs to be more action and less talk.

Doomsdayers have been putting expiration dates on Earth’s survival since the 1960s and one has yet to come true. This is not to say that climate change is not a real threat that should not concern people, but merely to question the accuracy of the far fetched claims that certain agencies continue to declare.

In 1967, Dr. Paul Ehrlich from Stanford University made claims that it was already too late for the world. According to the original published article by The Los Angeles Times, the population of the US was already too large and we would enter a long period of famine.

Closely followed in 1971, claims of an Ice Age began to emerge only to be dismissed in less than a decade. In 1980, acid rain was said to kill all life, but a decade later the U.S. National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program concluded there was no environmental crisis. In 1988, rising sea levels were going to threaten complete nations.

The current threat the public faces is the world will be burnt to a crisp. In 2008, NASA scientist James Hansen claimed that in five to 10 years the Arctic will be free of sea ice. In 2013, Professor of Ocean Physics and Head of Polar Ocean Physics group at the University of Cambridge Peter Wadhams said the Arctic would be ice free in two years and the US Navy predicted three years.

All these false predictions raise the question of how productive mass panic is to the current situation. Hysteria almost never has its intended effect of creating action among the citizens. Instead, threats begin to fall upon deaf ears as people lose their faith and trust in science.

“To me, the hysteria surrounding scientists attempting to predict climate catastrophes is like certain Christian groups trying and failing to predict the second coming of Jesus, except scientists are using actual data and still failing to make accurate predictions,” senior Ian Bell said.

To many people, the climate change issue is becoming a story similar to that of the boy who cried wolf. Celebrities, politicians, and the wealthy scold the middle to lower class while they themselves, have their own private planes or even methane and carbon producing factories that do very little to alleviate the issues they have created.

In the current situation, if we are sincerely committed to the issue, the light should be directed away from hysteria with concern to the world burning up in flames or straws killing turtles and shone on the genuine issues. The world is heating because of the increase in carbon in our atmosphere. Panic should be removed from the climate change discussion so that progress can be made.