Climate Shift in Focus

Personally I do believe in climate change. I think that it was an important shift when people started saying 'climate change' rather than 'global warming'. People say, when we got emergency level freezing here in New Mexico and "snowmageddon" in 2010, or 12 inches of snow right before Memorial Day "I don't see a lot of global warming going on here!" Well, they're right in a way. And that's the point. The climate is changing. The cause of it, I don't know (I do have theories and opinions, but that's not the point). But if you deny that there is a huge change going on, even over the last decade, you need to pull your head out of the sand.

But that's not the 'shift in focus' that I'm talking about. All through the 80s (when I recognized 'environmentalism' as a movement) and 90s (when I went to school) the focus was ozone depleting gasses, rain forest deforestation, acid rain, pollution and the quality of life, and consumer society waste and recycling. Now, the focus is on carbon emissions and climate change. It seems like all the 'save the whale' movements and other environmental issues are irrelevant, and the entire focus is on driving a hybrid car or denying human contributions to environmental decline. The shift in focus to Climate Change is damaging to the environmentalist cause because it's so politically charged.

If you believe the climate is changing or not, I don't care. If you believe humans made it happen, I don't care. But you cannot deny that a more polluted, eco-diversity diminished, landfill-filled planet sucks! The climate change argument isn't working, since the developing world is increasingly industrializing despite the inspiring TED talks out there, and the majority of the developed world outsources the responsibility from our minds since we live in a climate-controlled world anyway. There needs to be a new approach, and since environmentalists tend to operate under a more holistic mind-frame anyway, maybe the argument shouldn't be so narrow.