It is an irrefutable fact that climate change is real. It is happening and has a significant impact everywhere in the world. Climate change’s impact is not limited simply to warmer temperatures. It is fueling a drastic increase in extreme weather and changing weather patterns, from more frequent and stronger hurricanes and typhoons to wildfires burning at a faster rate than ever before. It is impacting water access, with historical water sources disappearing, fueling violent conflicts over such natural resources.
Furthermore, climate change is fueling migration, with people displaced by climate reaching a record level of 32.6 million worldwide in 2022 alone. And there is no international protection. The 1951 Refugee Convention does not cover climate refugees. By 2050, the situation will be dire. Researchers are predicting that, at the current course of the trajectory, over 216 million people will be forcibly displaced in their own countries due to climate change. No country is immune; even now, the United States has over 3 million “climate migrants,” those displaced within the country due to fires, floods, and other extreme weather.
Climate change is often framed as a technical problem: too much carbon, too little regulation, insufficient political will. But beneath these explanations lies a deeper disturbance—one that the German philosopher Günther Anders diagnosed decades ago, long before climate change became a household term. Anders argued that modern humanity has become obsolete relative to the technologies…
Climate change deniers, including President Trump, insist that there is no such thing as climate change and that measures taken to combat it only decrease economic productivity and stifle growth. In fact, the opposite is true; a plethora of scientific evidence suggests that such measures increase overall productivity and create millions of new jobs, which…
The electoral defeat of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is a triumph for everyone who is concerned about the peril of climate change. Bolsonaro’s well-deserved defeat could help save the Amazon rainforest, which has been ravaged under his criminal rule, and the process of reversing the looming climate change catastrophe can begin Righting the Wrong President-elect Luiz…
Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Started in 1970 in the wake of a number of environmental disasters, particularly the Santa Barbara, CA oil spill and burning of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, both in 1969, it has grown into a worldwide movement. Environmental clean-up and recycling efforts have been boosted, legislation (domestic…
I could not possibly applaud enough the young men and women who flooded the streets in hundreds of cities around the world demanding from their government to take immediate and long-term action to combat climate change. By the same token, I could not condemn and denounce more vehemently Mr. Trump and many of his ilk,…
Climate change is real and is visible for all to see. The scientific evidence is overwhelming, and denying that climate change is already upon us, especially as the president and his party does, flies in the face of the indisputably dire consequences that will be inflicted on all humanity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s…
To really address Trumpism and the denial of man-made climate change, we have to assume moral responsibility, not only for our actions but for our beliefs themselves. Philosophy has a crucial role to play today in addressing the moral challenge we face in terms of the weakening of our normative commitments. The antidote to Trumpism…