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Climate change – the long con

“The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”

Despite concerted efforts by many to dismiss climate change science as some vast modern conspiracy (specifically a communist conspiracy, designed to redistribute the world’s wealth) the above words were published in a New Zealand newspaper over a century ago, on Aug. 14, 1912. What’s more, Nobel Prize winning scientist Svante Arrhenius was studying the phenomenon of manmade global warming as early as the late 1800s.

If climate change is indeed some sprawling, convoluted hoax designed to assault our basic freedoms, it’s about as slow moving as the glaciers it now obliterates on a daily basis.

Consider the fact that ExxonMobil, without a doubt the most capitalist of enterprises, has been at the forefront of climate change research since the early 1980s. Only for some odd reason, it’s had a history of keeping this research to itself, routinely and vigorously opposing regulations that might stem the flow of its deadly fossil fuel emissions. A less naive observer might also find it damning that big oil companies once hired the same “researchers” enlisted by the tobacco industry to spearhead vast misinformation campaigns regarding the validity of climate change science.

Enough is enough. As the Amazon burns, the citizens of Iceland hold a funeral for the “dead” Okjokull glacier, and the city of Anchorage reaches ninety degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in recorded history, we can no longer pretend not to see what we are seeing.

There is indeed a conspiracy at hand, and it is being led by the very Machiavellian vultures who’ve successfully bamboozled the public on matters of scientific truth. Such powerful deceivers must be made into pariahs, regarded with the same contempt we show to flat earth conspirators, who discard mountains of irrefutable evidence in favor of their own fanciful realities.

The debate on global warming is over. Pull back the curtain, and you’ll see that it was over before it ever really began.

The only remaining debate is how, if at all, we are to stop a runaway crisis from becoming a full blown catastrophe, even as countless deniers languish in the shadows of doubt, insidiously cast by the shortsighted masters of mankind.

Aaron Dunbar

Lowell

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