For the first time in several election cycles, climate change wasn’t mentioned in any of the three major presidential debates or the vice presidential debate.
It wasn’t until a national weather event – superstorm Sandy – that politicians began to open up about the issue.
“It is disappointing, but not surprising,” Fred Andrus, University of Alabama associate professor of geology, said. “The science behind the issue is complex, and the solutions it will require will also be complex and disrupt the present economic status quo.”
Andrus studies the chemistry of “shells or skeletons of different organisms” to measure past climate change and human adaptation.
“The consequences of inaction will be suffered in the future; thus, the threats superficially appear more abstract and less pressing than other matters,” he said. “The issue has become so polarized, and the views held are so passionate, that there is political risk to anyone who brings the topic up.”
Professor Paul Aharon in the department of geological sciences said the lack of focus on climate change reflected political preoccupation with other issues.
“Well, it seems that one needs to worry about putting bread on the table before becoming concerned what will happen in a decade or two,” Aharon said. “Meaning that other burning issues such as the sluggish economy, unemployment, Afganistan, etc. took precedence.”
Aharon studies cave deposits to “reconstruct past rainfall variability.” He and his students collect deposits to understand rainfall variability of the past and hope to gain insight for the future.
Hurricane Sandy launched climate change into the spotlight in the last few days of the presidential campaign.
Both Andrus and Aharon expressed hesitancy to attribute a single event to climate change, however.
“One must distinguish between freak meteorological events from long term climate change,” Aharon said. “The Earth systems that continuously interact, such as ocean-atmosphere-land-biota, are extremely complex and presently impossible to disentangle between anthropogenic and natural factors.”
Andrus also noted a need to look for climate change with a long time frame.
“The problem comes down to the definition of climate versus weather,” Andrus said. “Climate refers to the average state of meteorological conditions in a region.”
He offered a football analogy, describing a new strength coach who implements a new training routine for the team.
“The head coach would want to evaluate if the strength coach is doing a good job,” Andrus said. “The head coach would not do that by examining the action of a single play, but rather would look for overall trends over the whole season. Single plays might only be useful if something truly extraordinary happened, but even then, ordinary players sometimes have exceptional plays. A series of extraordinary plays, however, may mean something fundamental about the player had changed.”
Similarly, Andrus said, to link events like Hurricane Sandy to climate change, it would be useful to see if such events were becoming more frequent.
“This requires measuring climate over a long period of time and is where the science I do may inform the study of global warming,” he said. “Evidence is mounting that such change is happening now.”
Anna Turkett, president of the UA Environmental Council, was displeased with the near lack of mention of climate change throughout the 2012 campaign.
“It really did frustrate me,” she said. “It was kind of upsetting to see it not talked about at all, and when it was talked about – by Mitt Romney – it was joked about.”
Turkett said the discussion about climate change has stalled, turning into questions of what to believe.
“There are people who have turned climate change into a debate about scientific literacy,” she said.
Turkett was disappointed that it wasn’t until Hurricane Sandy that talk of climate change was vaulted into the campaign.
“It shouldn’t take anyone dying or any kind of serious global event to talk about climate change,” she said.
Lin Wang, a member of the Environmental Council and president of Atheists at Alabama also expressed concern over the issue’s virtual role in the presidential campaign and said it’s time to talk about climate change.
“We need to open up the conversation for climate change,” Wang said. “Other countries are taking action on climate change, and I think it is critical for the United States, as a major power, to take a definitive stance on acknowledging and combating climate change.”
Andrus favors a large-scale “concentrated national effort” for combating climate change and advancing alternative energy solutions.
“Something on the scale of the Manhattan Project or Space Race,” he said. “This approach seems more historically and politically plausible than some other strategies I have heard of, given how America has risen to large challenges in the past.”
Aharon distilled his advice into a few short lines.
“Be more respectful of planet Earth and stop polluting it; learn how to live in harmony with nature, and preserve a habitable planet.”
