By Vijay Jayaraj

Are there bigger environmental concerns than climate change? Certainly. But we don’t hear that from our daily news anchors and bulletins.

Why are we obsessed with climate change?

Not long ago, our interests were limited only to weather. But in recent decades, climate change has dominated our news columns.

There is not a day without news on the coming climate doomsday. The reason for this is simple — climate change has been sold by the mainstream media as the most disastrous environmental phenomenon at hand.

But we can safely declare that they’re wrong. The world is not in immediate danger of collapsing due to climate change.

Arctic and Antarctic sea ice volume has never been higher in the last 11,700 years (except during the Little Ice Age of the 16th and 17th centuries), there is no dangerous rise in sea levels, polar bears are healthy, global agricultural outputs are at their highest levels, and there are no signs of global temperatures rising to levels we have not witnessed in the past 2,000 years.

But how about the other environmental problems we are currently facing?

Deforestation is a critical problem, and there are ongoing efforts across the globe to plant more trees. The climate alarmists’ propaganda has largely revolved around closing coal plants and implementing renewables, not planting more trees!

If anything, climate change has actually helped us recover our forest areas. Increasing carbon dioxide concentration levels and relatively warmer temperatures have helped plants grow at a much faster pace than before and also helped expand their ranges into high latitudes and high altitudes previously too cold for them.

Another major problem is the mismanagement of solid waste, especially plastic. The billions of dollars that are being currently spent on climate change mitigation policies could actually have been used for research and better solid waste management.

Water crisis is another major issue in tropical countries of Africa and Asia. Climate alarmists unsuccessfully tried to attribute the existing water crisis to man-made climate change despite no conclusive evidence.

Water is a sensitive resource in many parts of Africa and Asia. Rather than investing billions of dollars in substandard, inefficient, and unreliable renewable technology like wind and solar, the money could have been put to use in large-scale micro and macro water conservation projects. 
In fact, the climate change empire’s biggest obsession has been wind and solar. Little do the public know that these two sources are environmentally hazardous and already causing a lot of environmental health issues in China and elsewhere.

Climate change is not people’s most pressing concern. Climate alarmists have done injustice to the environment by diverting people away from real environmental issues that need immediate attention.

Even worse, they have been forcing countries to adopt technologies that are harmful to the environment while providing little return.

The climate obsession has surely blinded us from focusing our efforts towards finding solutions that address real-world environmental problems. Instead we are stuck with mere hypothetical theories about unproven false forecasts of our climate.

Perhaps it is time individuals and local communities move beyond the climate rhetoric of media and climate alarmists and get involved in real-world environmental causes that will leave a positive impact on the environment.

Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Chennai, India.