Climate change scientists reacting to the Harris-Trump debate say we can’t keep propping up fossil fuels
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that as humans continue burning fossil fuels, our collective emissions of greenhouse gases are unnaturally warming the planet. If this trend is not quickly stopped (and, if possible, reversed), humans will face existential threats including deadly heat waves, wildfires, droughts, floods and extreme storms.
During Tuesday’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, only Harris acknowledged these scientific facts. But critics say she didn’t exactly lay out a sound strategy for addressing it, either.
Dr. Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist who emphasized his opinions are his own, told Salon that he found the debates «disheartening.»
«The presidential discourse on climate amounts to ‘yes it exists, but we’re going to expand fracking and fossil fuel production’ on one side, to literally incoherent babbling with the word ‘China’ occasionally inserted on the other», Kalmus told Salon.
«There was so much bluster and falsities from Trump that those who are not informed may think are they are valid», Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who has published more than 600 articles on climatology, told Salon. He added that Harris did not rebuke Trump’s misinformation as effectively as she could have, instead seeming to focus on scoring with her own talking points.
«I have been in ‘debates’ with deniers of climate change and it is impossible to win because they tell lies and you cannot bring up the evidence to show they are wrong», Trenberth said. «The listener is the loser. I stopped participating in such debates long ago. Now if the debate is about what to do about something, then maybe.»
Kalmus said that this low quality conversation exists because our society has failed us on multiple levels.
«This is a tragic failure of our government, of powerful institutions in our nation, of extractive colonial capitalism itself which uses astronomical concentrations of wealth to pay off the media and politicians, allowing the public to blithely go on day after day without appropriate climate urgency», Kalmus said.
