At last semester’s Energy CCA roundtable, Hillsdale faculty engagingly presented on energy and climate change. Physics, chemistry, and economics professors, responding to other speakers, highlighted climate change’s reality and discussed the implications. Unfortunately, the venue was almost empty. Most donors had left; few students attended. Similarly, mostly faculty members attended Dr. Hayes’ presentation on climate change’s scientific evidence a week before.
These low student turnouts demonstrate the extent to which Hillsdale students are aware of the climate change threat. Global warming is “that thing liberals believe to control our lives” or simply off many students’ radars. Yet science department faculty, even at this bastion of conservatism, will tell you climate change is real and poses a serious problem to our planet’s future.
Americans remain woefully ignorant of basic ecological and environmental science. At Hillsdale, we profess to be exceptional, to ask the questions no one asks, to dig deeper than our contemporaries. Yet we probably get our climate change opinions from politicians, news commentators, parents, or just our general social milieu.
How many of us have glanced at the IPCC’s climate change report, examined statistics on Arctic sea ice loss, or understand the connection between temperatures at the poles, the jet stream, and extreme weather?
We don’t realize that upwards of 95 percent percent of published climate science taking a position on the issue supports climate change’s reality; that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of Earth, and the ice is melting faster than any models predicted; that, at our current pace, Earth will warm by three to five degrees Celsius by the century’s end, blowing past the two-degree target set to prevent dangerous outcomes; and that modern CO2 levels exceed any from the last 800,000 years.
Instead, climate change is revealing human nature’s worst: The inability to privilege long-term planning over short-term preferences, the refusal to believe our way of life could threaten others or Earth, and the tendency to believe those with the loudest voices. Evading responsibility for the human footprint, we expect God or the free market to perpetuate our prosperous civilization. Modern crises demonstrate that apathy is difficult to overcome; even growing knowledge of climate change has failed to galvanize global action yet.
A Hillsdale education should lead us to realize and to try to overcome these faults in human nature. To escape our biases, we must examine the evidence ourselves, and have the determination to take appropriate action. Those who do so will realize that manmade global warming presents a grave threat to the planet and to human civilization. Our species has inhabited an optimal “goldilocks zone” of moderate CO2 levels and stable temperatures for its entire existence. But recently, we’ve consumed fossil fuels at an increasing rate, taking stored carbon that took millions of years to accumulate and dispersing 9 billion tons a year of it into the atmosphere. This unprecedented carbon cycle shift, among other human environmental impacts, jeopardizes the conditions that enabled our complex industrial civilization.
True conservatism demands a skepticism of such radical reshaping of earth’s environment. At the very least, it should instill doubt that industrial civilization’s recent developments present risk-free opportunity.
Every Hillsdale student should defy the apathy of received opinion and examine the issue personally. Visit skepticalscience.com, glance at the IPCC report on climate change, attend the upcoming Gadfly panel discussion on climate change, or read the impending papal encyclical on the environment and climate change. Those who carefully examine the evidence will realize that the threat is real. However, those who disagree should at least engage with mainstream science. An understanding of the environment and our relationship with it is a vital part of liberal education today.
