Following President Trump’s claim this week at the United Nations that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” one of the world’s most influential scientists has told Newsweek that opposition to climate change policies is unscientific.
Katharine Hayhoe is the chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation and biodiversity organization, and has appeared on lists of the 100 most influential people on earth.
“So often when we hear people say climate change isn’t real or it’s not caused by humans or ‘it’s not bad,’ our immediate instinct is to line up all of the data and all of the facts, the thousands of pages of reports, the millions of scientific studies that have been done over the last hundred and fifty years and hit them over the head with it,” Hayhoe said.
“But the real objection people have is not to the science. Because if it were, they wouldn’t be using airplanes or stoves or refrigerators. It’s the same physics that explains how digging up coal and gas and oil and burning it produces carbon pollution,” Hayhoe added.
Hayhoe was speaking on the Climate Week NYC Daily Show, produced by Newsweek and Hi Impact. The annual Climate Week event takes place this year from September 21 through September 28, featuring over 1,000 events throughout the city.
“They don’t want to fix it. But instead of saying, ‘I don’t want to fix it’, they say, ‘well, it’s not real or it’s not bad or it’s not us’.”
“They don’t want to fix it”, she told presenter Rosanna Lockwood, because “it stands in the way of the accumulated power and wealth of some of the most influential people in the world, who have everything to gain from us continuing to depend on fossil fuels.”
Since the Paris Agreement in 2015 set out to prevent catastrophic warming, the world has moved from a projected five degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100 to about 2.7 degrees Celsius today.
“Tackling climate change would be beneficial for just about every human on the planet and all of the non-human life as well.”