Why I don’t believe in climate change

When someone asks me if I believe in climate change, my answer is an unequivocal “no.” Allow me to explain.

There are many things that are subject to belief. Some, for instance, believe that a fetus, regardless of how long it has existed in the womb, must be protected at all cost, even in cases of rape or incest, while others believe that a woman should have complete autonomy over her own body, including the right to terminate a pregnancy.

Here’s another example. Some people believe that affirmative action is the least we can do to make amends for our history of enslaving African Americans, while others believe that these policies unfairly discriminate against white people.

OK, one more. Some people believe that same sex couples should not have the right to marry or to adopt children while others believe they should have all the rights afforded to heterosexual couples.

All of these positions are based on one’s beliefs, whether rooted in politics, religion, or simply one’s subjective sense of right and wrong.

Climate change is different. It is a reality based on overwhelming scientific evidence, in the same way that so many other fact-based phenomena are. Take for instance, the earth being round, not flat; or the link between smoking and lung cancer; or the fact that our planet revolves around the sun, not vice versa. In all of these cases, asking someone if they believe in such indisputable and long-established scientific knowledge borders on the absurd.

So it is with climate change. The only legitimate question is not whether one believes in climate change, but whether one accepts the conclusions of nearly every climate scientist in the world. Here’s a list of those conclusions:

1. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat from the sun, making our planet fit to support life as we know it.

2. For the 400,000 years prior to the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 remained in a safe zone: under 280 parts per million (ppm).

3. Since the Industrial Revolution, our fossil fuel consumption has poured 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, resulting in concentrations jumping 50 percent to 419 ppm. And we continue to generate 150 million more tons of CO2 every single day.

4. This jump in heat-trapping gas has begun to rapidly warm our planet, upsetting the “just right” conditions that nurture life, causing increasingly severe floods, droughts, killer heat-waves, and storms — to mention nothing of sea level rise or the explosion in climate refugees — that will only continue to get worse as the planet gets hotter.

So when people ask me if I “believe” in climate change, of course I say “no.” But I am quick to add that, “I do accept the near unanimous conclusion of the world’s climate scientists, based on nearly 90,000 published studies, that climate change is as real as the ground we stand on.”

Some things are matters of belief; Climate change is not one of them.

Jonas Magram is co-founder of Climate Action Iowa.