BY DANIEL SAENZ
We are often told in the United States that climate change is an overly sensationalized issue that is not worth our time and money — particularly from extremely conservative politicians. Individuals such as Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, and Governor Mary Fallin of Oklahoma (who receive a great deal of funding from big oil giants such as Texaco, Exxon Mobil, the Koch Brothers, etc.) have gone on record against the impact of climate change.
While the others in the global community acknowledge that climate change is a threat and have passed efforts such as the Paris Climate Agreement, these efforts are proving not to be enough as the problem is continuing to worsen with each passing year. Since this last week, Japan has been suffering from an unprecedented heat wave that has put 22,000 people in the hospital with a heat stroke with 65 resulting casualties.
Mai Aoki, a former Japanese exchange student at Fort Hays State now living in Tokyo, remarked on the recent events, “It’s just crazy. I need to, but I do not want to go outside. The humidity is so uncomfortable,” Aoki said.
In Greece, the heat is just as bad if not worse. Coupled with strong winds in the region around Athens, the heat wave has started forest fires which have killed nearly 100 people and destroyed over 1,000 buildings.
There have already been scientific predictions about the Middle East and North Africa eventually drying up and causing a massive outpour of immigration based on these global warming trends. As we can already see, mass immigration provokes a racist backlash in the host countries’ government.
Even if countries like Japan and Greece can contain damage from the heat, this could cause a massive population movement from these parts of the world as well. Then, the world powers will have to squabble over who should take the refugees and how many they should take.
Dr. Michael Mann, a climatologist from Penn State, stated in an interview with The Guardian on July 27th that, “We are witnessing the effects of Climate Change in real-time. The relevant question is: ‘is climate change impacting these events and making them more extreme?’, and we can say with great confidence that it is.”
Climate change is genuinely a pressing issue for our time and we must put pressure on current and future governments to come up with sensible solutions.