A very convenient falsehood.

Over half of America’s population still believes that climate change is not a major threat, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 39 nations in 2013.

I ponder over the seemingly few reasons one might deny the very immediate risks associated with a warming world. Not the causes behind the global warming, but the warming itself and the resulting consequences.

One opposing party takes a religious standpoint in which they contest that God wouldn’t allow the world to be destroyed by pesky sustained heat and drought. According to a survey conducted by the Global Environmental Change, American evangelicals are more likely to be skeptical about climate change, as reported by The Guardian.

This directly contradicts the biblical claim that humanity will be destroyed by fire the next time around and not an influx of water, according to the Bible in book 2 Peter.

Or perhaps the conflict stems not from deity, but from democracy.

With a very liberal Al Gore at the helm of a death by disaster climate campaign, Republican proponents of partisan politics could disagree either because the notion is a liberal one or because they have a few bones to pick with Al Gore, amongst other reasons.

According to the National Journal, a Pew poll shows 70 percent of Tea Party members say there is no solid evidence that the earth is warming.

Among those politically-driven reasons could be a theory largely based on financial operation. Could the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the 100 governments meeting in Japan to discuss the issue, according to a report by CBC, be insidious in their intentions? Could they actually be hashing a plan to scare the globe into supporting a global redistribution of wealth masked as a green initiative?

I guess there’s an off chance.

I do assume that many global warming detractors simply loathe, as do I, the idea that this beautiful planet that circled the sun for 4.5 billion years could be ended by emissions and consumption in just a fraction of that time.

This is a sentiment that I fully understand. I have clean, running water that runs as long as I please. When I check the polar ice caps on Google Earth, I still see ice. Rain falls and the sun hasn’t yet burned lesions into my skin due to an absent ozone layer.

Despite this, and Al Gore, the truth is that evidence of climate change is just as prevalent as it is inconvenient.

Scientists call attention to the absence of El Nino (the commonly occurring warming of the central Pacific) in 2013, increasingly common floods in Africa, and the hottest year on record in Australia seen in a new report by the United Nations.

Though the report listed animal extinction and the drying of the Amazon rainforest among its projected risks, it also pointed out the human consequences of flood, hunger, disease and war as a result of the change.

If these changes are happening as science suggests, we ought to take heed and do what we can to make the world more habitable for both our future selves and generations after us, despite the inconvenience.

– Fletcher Bailey is a junior communication major from Seattle. He can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of Student Publications.