Too Late to Recover from Climate Change: Neil deGrasse Tyson

In light of the devastation and losses brought on by Hurricane Harvey and Irma, noted scientist and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said that climate change has already become so severe that it might be hard to recover from it. Tyson’s stance came as a response to a question posed to him during a CNN interview regarding Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert ambiguous reply on whether climate change had played a role in bolstering the strength of these two recent hurricanes.

“Fifty inches of rain in Houston!” Tyson exclaimed, before calling the occurrence a ‘shot across our bow’. He also emphasized that governments and people needed to wake up to the objective truths unraveled by the scientific community and use them to their benefit in their efforts to work toward a more balanced natural environment. He also bashed those who ‘cherry pick’ scientific evidence and studies to suit their own belief system. He said that the media hand picks and laps up research papers and scientific studies, as if they were singular entities when in fact the objective truth is out there and cannot be corroborated using just a single research paper or study.

Going further, he added that divergent research leaning in the same direction was what’s needed to establish objective truths, and that’s exactly what the scientific community had as far as human-induced climate change was concerned.

He also argued that debating whether climate change was real instead of channelizing discussion on finding ways to tackle it in the most efficient manner was a waste of valuable resources and time. Instead of arguing over whether findings of the scientific community were true, politicians should accept science as the base truth and then steer their political debate in a logical direction.

Hinting that the time to wage a winning battle against climate change was fast running out, Tyson said the longer the delay in concrete action, bleaker the outcome would be. “I worry that we might not be able to recover from this because all our greatest cities are on the oceans and water’s edges, historically for commerce and transportation. And as storms kick in, as water levels rise, they are the first to go. We don’t have a system – we don’t have a civilization with the capacity to pick up a city and move it inland 20 miles. This is happening faster than our ability to respond. That could have huge economic consequences,” he concluded.