Most of the inhabited world is polluted (and why Trump is NOT a climate denier)
See that smattering of blue dots? According to new data, those are the only places from 9000 air measurement points on Earth within WHO safe limits for air pollution.
At a national level, that means:
only Australia, New Zealand, Estonia, Iceland and a few small island states are within safe limits
countries such as Chad, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India are over 10 times safe limits
This is why over five million people die each year from pollution caused by fossil fuels. This is a wake-up call that the conversation about the world being ruined is not about the distant future: it is about today.
We can also see what is happening today with extreme weather. Another new study shows how climate change is already affecting cities, resulting in wetter and drier weather which the authors describe as “global weirding”.
The study analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected others and found that:
Overall: 95% of the cities showed a distinct trend towards wetter or drier weather
Climate whiplash: Cities such as Dallas, Jakarta, Shanghai and Nairobi have experienced a back-and-forth between extreme dry and wet weather.
Climate flips: Cities such as Cairo, Madrid, Riyadh and Hong Kong have experienced prolonged shifts from wet to dry weather; cities such as Lucknow, Bogotá, Tehran and Lahore have experienced prolonged shifts from dry to wet weather.
Obviously, this is yet more evidence demonstrating the reality of climate change, and the tendency is to think that if Trump and his ilk simply understood this truth, they would change their polluting ways. But it’s more complicated (and scarier) than that.
Trump is not a climate denier. Why would he be making a play for the resources in Greenland if he didn’t believe they would soon become more accessible due to the melting of the Arctic? Until this week, this was an unorthodox read of Trump’s actions, but check out these words the other day from U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at CERAWeek:
The Trump administration will treat climate change from what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world. We have indeed raised global atmospheric co2 concentration by 50% in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy, lifting millions of the world's, lifting almost all of the world's citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine, telecommunications, planes, trains and automobiles too. Everything in life involves trade-offs.
It is clear that Trump and his polluting cronies absolutely believe in climate change: they just don’t care and dismiss it as the cost of doing business. In short, they are making profits at the expense of our lives.
So showing evidence of pollution or the impacts of climate change is all well and good, but it’s not particularly useful when the other side already knows it but has a different agenda.
We are beyond the point of rationalisation with these polluting killers: they need to be removed from the equation with extreme prejudice.