Blog: Global Warming - A Hoax?
After a 22-hour coach journey, Lizzie, Jack, Abi, Jenny (my fellow climate change fighters) and I stood in a very long line waiting to register for our UN accreditation for COP 15 (United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009). Now you can imagine, after sitting for a very long time in a bus filled with body odour and five very tired pairs of eyes, we weren’t thrilled to wait in a line for two hours but life always has a way of reminding you of the bigger picture…
As I was attempting to stretch my back I was handed a piece of paper that got me upright straight away - the title read: ‘Global Warming Hoax Spells Genocide!’ Jack had started talking to this man and asked him why he felt global warming was a hoax… None of us thought that within the first couple of hours on Copenhagen soil, we’d already be confronted by a climate change ‘denier’.
He had many things to say, of course he mentioned the East Anglia University e-mail scandal and that Climate Change is all a hoax created by world leaders, especially the British Monarchy; to control the human population and action world genocide… talk about DRAMATIC.
Now of course this conference definitely has political power games at hand, but to dismiss climate change all together got all five of us rather riled up. With our recent experiences in Kenya and Lizzie’s four-year degree in Environmental Geo-Science, we definitely succeeded in arguing our point. Firstly, climate change does exist, and secondly, we don’t find it very appropriate to sit around and do nothing about it - but after 10 minutes we realised there wasn’t a chance in hell we’d get him to listen to us. My favourite line of his had to be when he proclaimed, “If you think CO2 is such a bad thing, such a terrible polluter, why don’t you stop talking, just stop breathing!”
There are many different perspectives on climate change and many different types of climate change deniers or sceptics, but I tend to agree with Tim James, the Director of sustainableIT, and his perspective on climate change, where he poses the situation as a business decision, ‘Whether you believe the science or you don’t, we cannot afford to get it wrong and we cannot afford the risk of facing the consequences.’
Words and photos: Yumna Martin. Ctrl.Alt.Shift’s Yumna is repping Ctrl.Alt.Shift at the climate conference – she won’t be sidetracked by the ‘deniers’.
I had some American and
I can't believe he thinks
I can't believe he thinks that world leaders created this...! They're the last people who'd want it - the whole world order we have is based on non-renewable fuels etc. so it's going to take a massive effort and a lot of money to change our lifestyles drastically enough. There's no way countries in the West would choose to do this.
The guy at the end sounds like he gets it a bit more - we can't afford to get it wrong, and it's already going wrong for a lot of countries, so we need to reverse the effects as soon as possible.