“We do have the opportunity to be the first generation that builds a sustainable world,” says 30-year-old Scottish data scientist Hannah Ritchie at the University of Oxford. “Let’s take it.”
Ritchie has become a leading figure in a group of scientists and analysts who are pushing back at the currently dominant apocalyptic warnings about a warming world climate, which many claim is an “existential” threat. Ritchie and others believe that the world is making progress in dealing with global warming and that optimism is warranted.
Ritchie does not deny that the world is warming, and that the consequences aren’t favorable. The problem is the extravagant rhetoric surrounding the topic. Some warming deniers say it’s all a political fraud, manufactured by liberal elites justify socialism. Others insist on throwing around the term “existential,” implying that a warmer world means the end of our species, or at least freezing together in caves. Neither outcome is realistic.
In a TED talk, Ritchie said, “It’s become strangely normal to tell our kids that they’re going to die from climate change. If sea-level rise doesn’t get them, then a wildfire will, or a global famine, or crop failures. Maybe a fatal heat wave, the insect apocalypse or the fishless oceans. These are the headlines we’ve all been told will be the end of humanity.”
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