Climate science should not be debated – Liberation

The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has been the highest for 2 million years. Since 1900, the rise in sea level has been faster than for 3,000 years. In some most exposed areas, such as French poles or Alps, the warming measured is already + 2 ° C.

The conclusions of the sixth and last report of the Intergovernmental Experts Group on Climate Evolution (IPCC) in March 2023 are final. Climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet.

Humanity took two centuries to cause these changes for two centuries. It only took three months to 47th President of the United States To make the climate an opinion.

In just hundred daysthe Trump administration has come out of The Paris Agreement on the climate and launched an unprecedented administrative, financial and cultural offensive against Environmental agencies or research institutes. The American ocean and atmospheric observation agency has lost almost 20 % of its workforce. « Exaggeration of climatic threats » and the exhibition of students to « climate anxiety » constitute sufficient reasons for Remove a grant dedicated to research. Almost 200 words, including that of « climate », were banished from the vocabulary of American public services.

To believe that France, country of the Enlightenment, would be safe from this obscurantist push is an error. Climate disinformation is no longer the only prerogative of the French extreme right, which, on the contrary, managed to train the conservative camp with it in its populist drift on the environmental issue.

Political figures supposed to belong to the republican arc already have the costume of Trumpism. Laurent Wauquiezex-Candidat to the presidency of the Les Républicains party, put on his own.

The former regional president claims the suspension of subsidies intended for the Lyon-II University for « Islamo-leftist drift » and openly qualifies the French Office for the Biodiversity of « Coalition of Ideologists ». These examples are far from isolated situations. In the era of post-truth, climate science would be neither more, nor less, than an ecological ideology.

And that’s where the shoe is pinches. This discredit of knowledge makes any enlightened democratic debate impossible. Climatic disruption is not a religion to which we could choose to believe or not to believe. It is a reality. By sinking into Trumpism, the French right gives in to populist ease and participates in the generalized weakening of democracy. The climate crisis is complex. Break to deny it is a form of cynical demagoguery for electoral purposes or, perhaps worse, of a simple intellectual and ideological laziness.

The scientific consensus around the causes of climate change should invite all the political leaders of all stripes to collectively share the observation of future perils. Loading to them and them, then not only to offer programmatic solutions to prevent, fight and adapt to global warming but also to confront them, on rational bases.

In a mature democracy, climate science should not be debated. On the contrary, it forces us.