This 2020 publication in the Wall Street Journal describes an interesting phenomenon it describes as the "Fake Climate Debate". This debate is between the two extremes - on one side, total deniers like Donald Trump who won't even consider the need for a climate change mitigation plan, and on the other, climate alarmists like Swedish 17-yr-old Greta Thunberg. The author here argues that the loud and brash debate between these groups is actually irrelevant, and that the real scientists are still conversing in the background. In countries where climate change is an accepted fact and a problem to be solved, the writer would be correct to conclude arguing with deniers such as President Trump is a waste of time. In the US, however, where climate change is still just making onto the political docket, those debates still lead to further support of mitigation efforts and understanding of the impacts of climate change in the future.
This Op-Ed in the New York Times is essentially framed as a blatant appeal to the soon-to-be-President to stop rejecting science and return the US to its brief track of environmental stewardship. This article demonstrates how political the conversation about climate change and environmentalism in general had gotten by 2016, when the US President-Elect himself was a climate change denier.
This article written in the Cincinnati Enquirer discusses the unfortunate consequence of the Climategate emails - there was a 15 percentage point drop in the proportion of adults who believed climate change is a large concern and should be a high priority in government between 2007 and 2009. It discusses how politicized academics had become and how that is posing a huge issue for the trustworthiness of scientists according to the public, a problem that has only gotten worse over the past decade since this article was written.
This article, written by the Washington Post and published in the Tampa Bay Times, describes the release of emails later known as "Climategate". The article digs into a few key points people have discussed from the emails, however fails to note anything of real significance that would lead to a dismissal of climate change as a reliable conclusion of their data.
This column in the Tampa Bay Times points out in simple terms how climate change will impact everyone through the variety of health issues it will pose, as well as how its impacts will be disproportionate among the poor, the elderly, and the uninsured. The column lists simple acts individuals can take to "do their part", however it places too much responsibility on the individual consumer as opposed to advocating for systemic or political change.
This article from the Wall Street Journal describes the new stance of the American Geophysical Union, which includes over 41,000 scientists world-wide. The APG released a statement that they are now "virtually certain" that climate change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions and that the warming will continue, further confirming the scientific consensus that climate change is real and a threat.
This article in the Wall Street Journal details some of the complications of the climate system as reasons not to conclude the climate is warming, and then proceeded to discuss some of the political implications of reacting one way or another about climate change. The writer concluded in the end that climate change is impossible to predict and therefore shouldn't be worried about, even as the IPCC was working on completing their third Climate Assessment that very same year.
This article from the Atlanta Daily World depicts what it calls Environmental Fanaticism, which appears to be a form of alarmism related to climate change. The writer clearly disagrees with the measures set to be discussed later that year in Kyoto, and is not convinced any economic degradation of any kind can be worthwhile when he claims scientists haven't reached a consensus about climate change or how humans may be contributing to it.
This Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal was in response to a few different pieces about climate change. The writer here argues that scientists are still disagreeing about if the atmosphere is even warming, what the costs of that warming might be, and also if that potential warming might actually be beneficial. He concludes that there is no point in inviting in economic disaster over something that might not even be a problem, meanwhile the majority of the climate science community had agreed that the climate was warming for quite a few years, and that it likely was going to start causing problems soon.
This Letter to the Editor published in the New York Times in 1988 included some very solid climate science, but drew a very different conclusion than might've been expected in the hottest year on record - that a brand new ice age was right on the cusp. Conveniently, the author still recommended the same emissions reduction techniques oft-cited for warming mitigation, so even with misguided conclusions his advice was still sound.
This Wall Street Journal Opinion article published in 2012 details a laundry list of reasons that politicians shouldn't be focusing their efforts on climate change mitigation, but misses the mark when describing the science that supports climate change. The author here claims that a consensus hadn't yet been reached on whether climate change was really occurring and even stated that increased CO2 in the atmosphere may even prove beneficial for the planet, which has been easily disproven by the negative impacts that could already be seen globally at that point in time.
This Wall Street Journal article details the inspiration many environmentalists felt about climate change mitigation following the success of the Montreal Protocol, and some aspects preventing similar treaties from being enacted for climate change.
This article from the Atlanta Constitution in 1981 discusses some scientific findings on climate change and its relation to carbon dioxide emissions, but ends by casting doubt on assumptions made in the climate models.
This article from the Atlanta Constitution in 1924 discusses the natural variability of weather, and claims that nature follows no patterns. It also states that climate changes can only happen so slowly that humans would never notice - this belief may have been true at the time, since it wasn't for another 20 years or so that regularly changes in global temperature were accurately and consistently recorded.
Even though the current US President is a climate change denier, climate change still became a topic of the Presidential Debates leading up to the 2020 US Presidential Election. In addition, in the beginning of November a President-Elect with an actual climate change mitigation plan was elected!
While emissions briefly dropped during the global shutdown due to COVID, it quickly became evident that even change of that level wasn't enough to bring emissions down to safe levels. On the bright side, the global response to COVID-19 did indicate that global emergency responses are possible, if the need appears dire enough. The next problem is that by the time the need seems dire enough to deal with climate change, it will be too late.
US President Trump announced the US would be leaving the Paris Agreement as soon as it was able to a matter of months after the agreement went into effect. He claimed the requirements of the agreement would hurt the economy and punish the US over countries like China, who he claimed were much worse for the environment than the US. Since the US is still one of the top-3 greenhouse gas emitting countries, their leaving the Agreement greatly weakened its ability to effectively mitigate climate change.
The Paris Agreement was a voluntary and non-binding international agreement reached in 2015 with a goal of keeping global temperature rise well below 2 degrees C this century and pursue an ambitious goal of staying below 1.5 degrees C, which has been stated as a safer target. Participating countries submitted their own climate plans to try to enact, and the goal was that with less consequence of failure, more countries will dare to be ambitious.
In November 2009, just before the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December, over 1000 emails between scientists from the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia. These emails proved to be rude and dismissive, but were far from evidence of data-tampering that climate skeptics tried to make them out to be. With all the confusion and hype, however, many people were convinced the scientific consensus was considerably less confident about climate change than was accurate, and the "scandal" resulted in a dark cloud over climate science for a long time afterwards.