There has been a decades long campaign against the science of climate change. When you look deep into the methods they are the same, done by many of the same people, who spent years denying that smoking caused cancer. Science was denied, the truth was buried, and facts were called into question. This same effort has been pushed against the science behind climate change. When it was first brought to the worlds attention there was less certainty and more time and  there were so many objections. Acting on climate change was big government. It was going to cost money. The oil companies were against it. If you are old enough to remember the years where medical science said how dangerous smoking was while the facts were ardently and effectively denied. That same machine was turned on climate change.

Al Gore, who was one of the early national voices supporting the need to act, was used to make it a political issue rather than one of science. Science was denied and scientists themselves were questioned. It has lasted for decades and it has done untold damage. Our world is in serious trouble and there is a part of our country that is still denying it. They say there is still snow so how can the world be warming. They say that the worlds climate scientists are in it for themselves. They say that we can’t effect the worlds climate, they say so much and all of it is wrong. They put belief before science and call it real.

We led the world in the creating the damage but where were we when our own scientists found out that we were doing? Profit was more important. Lies were more important. Denial was more important. Deniers buried their head in the sand and now they are afraid to look up and acknowledge what they have done.

They try more arguments. I’m not a scientist. The climate always changes. There are bigger problems in the world. Why are we worrying about climate change when we have problems like ISIS? They refuse to acknowledge or even recognize how intertwined all of it is. They won’t see how droughts in Syria led to a surge of people flowing into cities, poverty, and hunger that led to desperation that left young men susceptible to a call to evil. Sure there are a lot of factors but that is a part of it. It’s an underlying factor.

We can’t ignore it anymore. It’s time to act. The world is already deeply impacted. We have to act now. We can’t let science be denied because the path ahead of us is hard. We can’t say that the government doesn’t have a role in this because we have to lead. Ignoring what was going to happen, questioning and denying the facts, denying the science got us into this now its time to use science not ignore it. It’s time for our country to unite about something and to lead the world rather than hiding from it.