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Zakary Hahn
ENG 1201
Professor Hunter
9 September 2019

Why Did Global Climate Change Become a Political Debate?

My initial interest in Global Climate Change came from learning about it more than a

decade ago, and simply being made aware that it was a real thing, but my passion came much

later when doing my own research. I wanted to know more about the counter points I kept

hearing. I understand science changes. I’ll be one of the first to argue the point that we can’t

blindly accept all modern knowledge as absolute. Data changes and so does our perception.

Well, as time has gone by, the consensus in the scientific community about Climate Change has

changed. Over time, more studies were done, more observations were made, more data was

collected, and now… even more of them concur it is both happening and caused by humans. The

consensus here, and the social response made it look like we were pushing for change. But a

counter culture still existed, and in recent years it seems to have been growing rapidly.

I started looking into both sides of the debate. I found the information supporting Global

Climate Change is wildly easy to access for anyone interested in learning about it. The least

biased and most well-presented source of information was NASA’s own page on Climate

Change. It is very informative. I looked for the most commonly quoted ideas used to counter

human made climate change, and I looked into the most popular websites presenting this data. I

found that the information was often not cited at all and was being presented by someone with no

relevant credentials or scientific background. Sometimes charts and graphs were plagiarized,
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and while they had no citation, a reverse image search was able to find the source. The source of

the data was accompanied by their more credible interpretation of it’s meaning which

contradicted the climate-denier’s claims. One example was an article using data on cooling north

Atlantic Ocean temperatures as evidence for Climate Change being fake. When I found the root

of the data, the original scholarly article, the researchers conducting the study attributed the

cooling north Atlantic Ocean temperatures to melting glacial ice as a result of… Global Climate

Change. The conclusion was that there is no real science countering the mainstream claims of

Climate Change, and the scientific support is vast and unyielding. I believe it is not only

unreasonable to make a debate against its existence, but even the stance that humans are not

having an impact on it is a remarkably ignorant position to take. Global Climate Change is not a

debatable topic, nor is the human component. It is supported by an extensive library of research,

peer reviewed studies, centuries of data, and the greatest minds of our time. With all the data

supporting it, and the lack of data to deny it, where was the motive to perpetuate the debate at

all?

I think the discord lies in conspiracy. Now, I won’t write off a conspiracy as soon as I

hear the word. Most of them are routed in real events with some real data, and then spin this to fit

a specific point. It is something where you need to separate the fact from conjecture and form

your own logical connections. Which is tragically the same process you have to apply to any

major news article these days. For a conspiracy to be plausible there needs to be a person or

organization that has a reason to commit the act, hide that fact, and have the resources to do both.

So, on one hand, you have people who say Climate Change is a conspiracy, where everyone who

says it is real is part of that lie, paid off by the evil green energy companies. In this scenario, the

underdog in the energy sector, with comparatively limited financial resources, is responsible for
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bribing a majority of lawmakers as well as 99% of the scientific community, with the intention

of furthering their enterprise, which (because other energy sources are non-renewable) is

destined to take over the energy sector regardless of if they take any action or not. That does not

seem like a very stable concept to me. On the other hand, you could say that maybe big oil and

gas, the largest and most well established part of our energy sector, has bribed a minority of

lawmakers and 1 or less percent of the scientific community to perpetrate disinformation to stall

environmental reform which would have a direct financial impact on their organizations had they

taken no action at all.

And that is what I believe. That big oil has made specific efforts to undermine popular

consensus of scientific findings to stall political action. I believe disinformation has been a long-

standing strategy used by organization with the means to manipulate the media. And I believe it

has been going on for a very long time. I know that there is a documented history of this. The

C.I.A. used the news to manipulate the American people in the 80’s, and I imagine they had done

so before and have done so since. I know most media groups are owned by a few large

industries, and the majority of the content presented is conjecture not fact. I know that viewing

an article from a non-American media source presents another side of the story. And while I

hate the popularized concept of boiling down any conflicting data to “fake news,” I have to

acknowledge that the true goal of mainstream news outlets is to manipulate their audience. If it

wasn’t, they would only present the facts and allow others to make their own opinions. Instead,

the news is a bunch of talking heads telling people what opinions they should have.

My main goal is not to dissect the efficacy of the news, but instead to show facts that can

identify when this political shift took place. George Bush senior used Climate Change in his

presidential campaign as something he intended to solve. It wasn’t a debate between parties

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about if it was real, it was something both major political groups thought we needed to address.

There are documents that have surfaced from Exxon that show their own researchers concluded

climate change was real, and they decided to use that knowledge to begin a campaign of

disinformation. But I want to know more. I want to arm myself with knowledge and source data

to make a compelling argument for when this started, who was responsible, and how it was

popularized.