Harrison Ford warns against politicians who don’t believe in climate change

Ask climate scientists, and they’ll tell you that the planet is experiencing climatic and environmental changes that pose an impending existential threat to much of life on Earth. Ask self-styled “climate skeptics,” though, and they’ll retort that all such talk is alarmism and pretty much everything is hunky-dory with the climate and the planet.

Depressingly, many such climate skeptics are policymakers who wield the levers of power in industrialized nations and may enact policies that worsen matters or else ones that impede meaningful action on our CO2 emissions and polluting ways.

Ask Harrison Ford, however, and he’ll tell you that we must “stop giving power to people who don’t believe in science, or worse than that, pretend they don’t believe in science for their own self-interest.”

The Hollywood star has issued this call during an impassioned speech at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, where he warned that “the future of humanity was at stake” as a result of climate change.

And we are in this together, regardless of where we live, what we do, and how much money we have, the actor stressed. “We are all, rich or poor, powerful or powerless, we will all suffer the effects of climate and ecosystem destruction,” stressed Ford, 76, who has been a noted environmentalist. “And we are facing what is quickly becoming the greatest moral crisis of our time. Those least responsible will bear the greatest costs,” he went on.

Although the Indiana Jones star did not mention any names, it’s assumed he directed his dig at the Trump administration, which has waxed ambivalent about the threat of climate change. “We face an unprecedented moment in this country,” Ford said. “Today’s greatest threat is not climate change, not pollution, not flood or fire. It’s that we’ve got people in charge of important s— who don’t believe in science.”

The facts about ongoing changes to the planet’s climate are undeniable. Seventeen of the warmest years on record have been since 2001 and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have not been this high in 650,000 years. Meanwhile, ice sheets at the poles are losing their mass at alarming rates.

“The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere,” NASA notes.

“Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with the five warmest years on record taking place since 2010,” the US space agency adds. “Not only was 2016 the warmest year on record, but eight of the 12 months that make up the year — from January through September, with the exception of June — were the warmest on record for those respective months.”