Climate change is a pressing issue for individual countries and the entire world. Excessive carbon dioxide emission, the primary cause of global warming, resulted in significant ecological problems and biodiversity loss in the most affected regions (Cooke, 2020). Furthermore, the scientific community presents an increasing number of facts that the rapid development of environmental problems is primarily caused by anthropomorphic activity (Cooke, 2020). Even though international law obliges countries to protect their citizens from dangers that stem from ecological disasters, nations seem to fail to provide this right to people (Reynolds, 2019). On the one hand, a group of politicians may not resolve this problem; however, in reality, all resources are concentrated in their hands. The main reason the general population is not involved in resolving this challenging situation is its lack of power.
Although global warming is a hotly debated topic, some groups claim that the issue is not as acute as it is presented. For example, according to Khairullina et al. (2019), significant greenhouse gas emissions are produced as a result of volcanic eruptions, seismic activity of the tectonic plates, and other geological processes. Furthermore, studies show that various factors like solar activity and Earth’s inner core changes have a tremendous impact on climate change (Khairullina et al., 2019). Again, a group of politicians cannot alter how the planet or the sun functions. It appears that many environmental issues should be further discovered to determine the actual causes before governments are blamed for the lack of action.
Serious environmental problems motivated researchers to measure the impact of humanity on climate change, but they may be discouraged by the disconnectedness from society that cannot access their results due to science-politics discord. According to Cooke (2020), many climate scientists came to the conclusion that countries should reconsider their ethical values and policies regarding the impact on nature. After determining that human actions over the past 100 years caused a significant rise in the planet’s temperature, researchers call on governments to change their approaches and regulation to make them more sustainable (Cooke, 2020). Although over politicization of the climate issue did not harm the research itself, it created barriers to interaction between the public and science.
As dark as this issue may seem, it enabled the advancement of scientific research in this field. Specifically, it increased investments in studies about alternative fuel sources and facilitated the development of solar geoengineering (Reynolds, 2019). The use of fossil fuels for heat and energy production has been beneficial for people for centuries; however, it produces harmful levels of carbon dioxide (Reynolds, 2019). Therefore, solar geoengineering became one of the possible solutions to the existing environmental challenge (Reynolds, 2019). Using pure energy sources may lessen the damage of technological and industrial development to nature.
References
Cooke, M. (2020). Ethics and politics in the Anthropocene. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 46(10), 1167–1181.
Frank, A. (2014). A problem like no other: Science and politics. NPR. Web.
Khairullina, E. R., Bogdanova, V. I., Slepneva, E. V., Nizamutdinova, G. F., Fatkhullina, L. R., Kovalenko, Y. A., & Skutelnik, O. A. (2019). Global climate change: Cyclical nature of natural and permanent nature of man-made processes. Eurasian Journal of Biosciences, 13(2), 2311-2316.
Reynolds, J. L. (2019). The governance of solar geoengineering: Managing climate change in the Anthropocene. Cambridge University Press.