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Essay On No Right Way To Deny Climate Change

Decent Essays

Nadia Karzouz
English 111- 1W3
8 October 2017
No Right Way to Deny Climate Change:
The History of Global Warming’s Politicization in The United States

The North American Drought of 1988 marked the very first time global warming crossed over from scientists to mass media coverage. Following an American professor’s address to the Senate correlating abnormal weather to global warming, European nations addressed the issue, and many countries began to reduce greenhouse gas. The European Union ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to make it legally binding. In Europe, global warming was acknowledged as a problem, with the only debate centered around how serious of a problem it was- 87% said it was a very serious problem, where around 10% …show more content…

Bush campaigned for the 2000 election, he explicitly opposed Kyoto as it “would cause serious harm to the US economy” (Borger, 2001). The international issue of global warming was thusly labeled as something that could be ignored in favor of local economic profit, and emission reduction was assumed to be impossibly expensive. Bill Clinton signing the Kyoto Protocol and George W. Bush refusing to sign it (ignoring that the Senate refused to ratify the protocols both times) polarized the issue of global warming into a Republican and Democratic issue, where Republicans either downplayed or denied the issue of global warming and Democrats vied for it to be regarded as a problem (Dunlap & McCright 2010). In December 2007, the Christian Science Monitor (an international news organization without Christianity-related bias) revealed that George W. Bush actively suppressed climate scientists to maintain public opinion that global warming wasn’t an issue (Clayton, 2007). This study revealed a series of abuses dating as far back as within a month of him coming into office- the first being a contradiction between what the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reported on global warming evidence found by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and what was released to the public. When the NAS affirmed that their findings were true and accurate, the Bush administration maintained the idea that global warming is

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