The ISCFC is all about reducing our individual and collective contributions to climate change.
But is climate change really happening? Is it mostly caused by human activity, including our production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases?
In the United States and elsewhere, there are people who are not convinced by the science. But the great thing about science is that we use evidence to evaluate scientific questions. So what is the evidence related to climate change?
Are you or are you not convinced by the majority of climate scientists who say that climate change is real and largely human caused? Why are you convinced/not convinced? What evidence might change your mind one way or the other?
Is Climate Change Real & Human-Caused? >
Global Warming is anthropogenic
Although climate change has been a large problem for the past decades, many around the world hold many shallow or false perceptions of global warming as a whole. The first misconception, which appears in politics in the status quo, is that the concept of global warming is false and/or is exaggerated. Global Warming is anthropogenic (or, human-caused); even if global warming were an inevitable and "natural" process, human contribution has exacerbated global warming exponentially. In 2012 alone, the World Health Organization reported that around 7 million people died as a result of air-pollution exposure, mostly impacting low income communities and communities of color. Many "first-world countries" deny the detrimental impacts of global warming because the impacts are gradual, disproportionately affecting areas of poverty and areas that are currently are in the process of modernizing. Indigenous people in Brazil and other parts of South America are exploited under the capitalist system of profit, which reduces all living things, including nature and humans, into numbers t hat feed a larger system of expenses of revenue. The cutting down of trees in the rain forest not only massively contribute to the process of global warming but also displace many animals, as well as people, that depend on the environment that was previously eradicated. More locally, global warming disproportionately affects communities of color-- specifically that of low income black and brown communities. The communities surrounding coal plants are usually low-income communities of color because the land is cheap, due the unsafe conditions of pollution and living near a coal plant. The dependence on the use of coal to fuel the country disproportionately affects these communities of color, disregarding their situation in large-scale discussions of global warming. In addition, the blanketing of consequences of global warming over quicker, existential threats such as "terrorism" and "nuclear proliferation" contributes to the larger problem of justifying exploitation of the environment to "survive" larger, hyper-falsified threats. It is important to put global warming at the forefront of political and central discussions, especially focusing and bringing to light the disproportionate effects of global warming onto communities of color and low-income communities.