At a recent meeting I attended with a representative from Congressman Riley Moore’s office at the Resiliency Center in Parkersburg, another meeting attendee referred to the anthropogenic (human-caused) global climate crisis as, to paraphrase, a hoax or a farce. I was floored that someone who seemed otherwise competent, rational and data-driven could hold such a willfully ignorant view.

There is more evidence for human-driven global climate change than for the scientific theory of gravity. The greenhouse effect has been well-understood since at least the 18th Century. As I’ve shared in the pages of the News and Sentinel before, Dr. James Lawrence Powell, MIT-trained Geophysicist twice appointed to the National Science Board by Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr., completed a literature review of peer-reviewed, published scientific literature in 2019-2020 and published his findings in the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society. Powell found 100% consensus that human-driven climate change is absolutely occurring amongst 11,602 published scientific articles on “climate change” and “global warming.”

Recent reporting from the American Meteorological Society shows that every single one of the 58 glaciers the society tracks globally lost mass in 2024. Recent melting of the Mendenhall Glacier forced evacuations in Juneau, Alaska, as the Mendenhall River swelled to record levels. Enormous swaths of continental Europe and Canada are experiencing wildfires following record heat extremes. Record-breaking sea surface temperatures enabled Hurricane Erin to go from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane at a historic rate. As I write, the storm is set to cause dangerous surf and rip currents along Carolina and other beaches but fortunately is not projected to hit the U.S. East Coast head on.

We can no longer afford the kind of head-in-the-sand thinking that says all this is just part of normal climactic cycles or is attributable to solar activity or that excess CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gas emissions building up in the atmosphere and oceans are a net positive for life on earth. Unfortunately for us all, this nonsense is what’s coming out of the second Trump administration, costing us invaluable time to address this ongoing crisis.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has recently released an analysis showing that from January 20th to June 30th of this year, the second Trump administration carried out 402 attacks on science–instances where science has been sidelined or threatened in the federal government. To quote from a piece in the Charleston Gazette-Mail by Mike Tony, “The Union of Concerned Scientists pointed to Trump administration moves to remove experts from federal agency leadership, halt government data collection and cut scientists out of government decision-making.”

With all of the mass precipitation events we’ve seen devastate West Virginia and Kentucky in recent years, you would think there would be a heightened awareness about and desire to understand cause and effect. Our atmosphere holds 7% more moisture for every 1-degree centigrade of warming. With the Arctic and Antarctic warming about 3x faster than the rest of the globe, changes in jet streams making them wavier with more extreme rises and troughs lead to more extreme temperatures (e.g. tropical heat in summer or polar vortexes in winter) reaching mid-latitudes and contribute to stalled out systems of precipitation that can drop feet of rain on small geographic areas in extremely short periods. When those rain extremes hit Central Appalachia, our extraction industry-scarred landscapes atop and between our hollers and hills can and do become conduits of death.

If you visit Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action’s very popular Facebook group page, you can use a search tool to sort through posts dating back 10 years offering a wide range of incredibly important information and analysis. We’re also revamping our website (movclimateaction.org) to become, in part, a hub of climate, environmental and public health resources from the local to the global. We have the technology and knowledge to mitigate the global climate crisis and adapt to what’s locked in; what we lack is the sustained political will.

Very popular yard signs that we’ve deployed for years say on one side “Climate Voter: Make America Green Again” and on the other “Protect What’s Ours: Be A Climate Voter.” We’d love for you to put a sign out as we approach another election year!

More important than simply putting the sign out, though, is following its guidance. We hope you and yours will be climate voters in 2026 and beyond. There’s no more time for denial or delay.

Eric Engle is board president of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.