Politics and climate change are intertwined since the rapid change in our climate is caused by people, and politics dictates the policies and governing decisions that affect the people. Our climate is very complex, which leads climate science to have some uncertainty, and allows for the extremist views to cloud public judgement. Rather than acknowledging the truths and unknowns surrounding the change in climate, we see politicians that only accept the truths or only accept the uncertainty to base their claims for the policies they want to see implemented. Al Gore has focused a lot of his efforts to opening up the minds of the public and trying to build up the reality of our current climate change situation. Leonardo DiCaprio recently released a documentary to explain his involvement in efforts to reduce climate change and to educate the people on the phenomena. We also can compare these efforts with a statement Donald Trump has made about climate change, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make the US manufacturing non-competitive”. I don’t even need to fact check this statement to know that it is utterly ridiculous, but the sad truth is, a great deal of Americans agree with him, and now with his new position of power, I think we will see a major impact of politics on climate change and policies that pertain to the preserving of our planet.
Individuals can help reduce their personal impact on climate change by the first R that we know, REDUCE. We need to reduce the amount of fossil fuels that we use, to start this we can use cars less, take a bike or a walk if your destination is close, try to trade in things that you would ordinarily buy for something you can reuse or do on your own. One of the main challenges with combating climate change is the attempt to get full acceptance that human activities are causing the change in climate. According to a 2010 poll, 41% of Americans do not believe that humans impact climate change. I think that another thing that we can do to impact climate change is teaching, if we can inform as many people we know of the human impact on climate change, and encourage them to try to reduce their own carbon footprint. Once the majority of people are educated about climate change, and we can reduce the 41%, politicians will not be able to ignore the facts surrounding climate change, and media will no longer be dominated by the extremist views on climate change.
James Hansen produced a Ted Talk explaining his involvement with climate change and how he was faced with many difficulties and censorship from the government throughout his repeated attempts to inform the people about the impacts of climate change. Even when faced with the facts about climate change, efforts to find fossil fuels still continued to increase. In the 80s, Hansen worked with NASA to research climate change, and was able to predict a number of events that would happen due to climate change, and these have since occurred we need to implement 6% per year reductions in emissions to reverse human impacts on climate change.