One of the Canadian friends I met at the conference. His name is Mark, and in his country, 98% of citizens believe in the reality of climate change.
This recent story caught my eye: Canadians, by a margin of 98%, accept the reality of climate change. That means, if my kindergarten math still serves me, that only 2% don’t believe that climate change is real.
Amazingly, this is an even larger margin than climatologists themselves, who accept the reality of climate change at only a rate of 97%.
In San Francisco, I attended the Climate Reality Project‘s leadership training, which you can read about here. A good deal of the presentation by Al Gore, who on the second day of the conference held forth for nearly 10 hours, was about how to deal with skepticism about climate change.
Skepticism in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence.
Now I understand why conference leaders kept announcing break-out sessions for people from countries who don’t have to deal with climate change skepticism. There were members of almost 60 countries in attendance, the majority of which are comprised of citizens who don’t disbelieve science. Only a handful, including most notably the profligate carbon emitters of the planet per capita, the USA, struggle with accepting fact.
Of course, Canadians are a lot closer to the reality, as the Arctic Sea ice continues to be a cause for alarm, if not downright horror.
We have our work cut out of us, folks, in moving the conversation about climate change past the debate, and into solutions.
