The Climate Change Debate

There seems at present to be a great deal of confusion in the general community as to whether or not global warming and climate change are real. Climate change skeptics abound. Lord Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley for instance, recently toured Australia, including Newcastle, spreading misinformation. In his lectures he disputes whether global warming is man-made, suggests that it is unlikely to prove catastrophic, and criticizes the science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body established by world governments to provide a clear scientific view on the current state of climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences. Lord Monckton accuses world governments of conspiring to make money out of the climate change scare by ultimately taking control of world financial markets. It seems to me that Lord Monckton is doing quite nicely out of climate change himself!

Schools are in an ideal position to provide the facts and clarify the issues associated with climate change. Every opportunity to do so must be taken so that our students are accurately informed.

People in the community need to stop debating the science and start debating the politics of the best way to solve the problem. It really makes no sense for people, especially people with no scientific background, to make statements like: “I don’t believe in climate change.” With the huge amount of evidence now collected and analyzed, it is akin to saying “I don’t believe in atoms.” or “I don’t believe in DNA.”

Amongst the scientific community worldwide, the basic understanding surrounding the global warming issue is that warming since the Industrial Revolution is undeniable, it is being driven by human causes, and it presents a distinct threat to the earth’s climate system. Global warming is a definitive reality created by human actions, and it connects at a fundamental level with several other serious problems facing society – the global population crises, the power crises, the global food & water shortage to name a few. Climate change ranks as the single greatest threat to modern society, and the future results will be cataclysmic without effective policies to control the human destruction on the climate. As members of a Catholic school community we have a joint responsibility to get this message out there and to get the debate focused on solving the problem!