Today is Earth Day, an event that has been almost entirely hijacked by the ridiculous and dangerous climate change movement.

"Climate" appears a total of 10 times on the earthday.org home page and 15 time on the subpage for this year's event. The first action item on the Greenpeace USA home page is a link to a new report, "How Social Media Companies are failing to Tackle Climate Information." The United Nations International Mother Earth Day home page starts with the childish statements "Mother Earth is clearly urging a call to action. Nature is suffering." as if our planet were a conscious entity, and cites "climate" no less than seven times. Pollution is referenced once. Land once. Water and air not at all.

And this is the same in many places on the web. Even today's Google search engine home page doodle take you to a page that proclaims, "Today's annual Earth Day Doodle features real time-lapse imagery from Google Earth and other sources showing the impacts of climate change across our planet."

This has been going on for years, of course. Instead of concentrating on real world issues, Earth Day has been focussed on the nonsensical climate change crusade. Indeed, liberal elites continue to push the climate change narrative no matter what else is happening in the world. For example, in her video address to mark Earth Day 2020, UN Climate Chief Patricia Espinosa "urged the international community to remain focused on Earth Day 2020's overarching theme of climate change, despite the COVID-19 crisis..."

The Earth Day 2020 website went further and explained,

"The theme for Earth Day 2020 is climate action. The enormous challenge -- but also the vast opportunities -- of action on climate change have distinguished the issue as the most pressing topic for the 50th anniversary. Climate change represents the biggest challenge to the future of humanity and the life-support systems that make our world habitable."

But most people in the world clearly do not agree, according to the UN's own "My World" poll that between 2013 and 2020 appeared athttp://data.myworld2015.org/. For the almost 10 million people who voted in the poll before it was pulled from the Web (it is still viewable on the Web archive), "Action on climate change" ranked dead last, despite the fact that the UN listed that priority first among issues to be selected from.

Of course, such results must have been very inconvenient for climate-fixated UN Bureaucrats, so, after ending the My World survey, they are essentially running the poll again. This time, they ask for the public to tell them:

WHICH SIX OF THE FOLLOWING GLOBAL GOALS ARE OF IMMEDIATE CONCERN TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY?

So far, 582,100 people, about 70% of whom are 16 - 30 years of age, have voted (almost half of them from Mexico, Espinosa's home base, and only 4,524 from the U.S. and 1,119 people from Canada). If you want your vote counted in this new poll, go to https://myworld2030.org/. "Climate Goal 13: Climate Action," is currently ranked 9^th out of the 17 goals that one can select from, giving it only about 10% of the votes cast.

When their surveys showed relatively low concern about environmental issues in their 2015 poll, Gallup proposed several causes of the decline--a more positive view of the state of the environment, increased economic concerns, and politicization of environmental issues. But one explanation they gave should trouble Earth Day strategists: they are, in effect, focused on the wrong issue. Gallup explained,

"The primary focus of the environmental movement has shifted toward long-term threats like global warming -- issues about which Americans tend to worry less than about more immediate threats like pollution. Importantly, even as global warming has received greater attention as an environmental problem from politicians and the media in recent years, Americans' worry about it is no higher now than when Gallup first asked about it in 1989."

Most sensible people are environmentalists. We want clean air, land, and water and we hope that future generations will live in an even better world than we do. Yet climate change now dominates, not just Earth Day, but the entire environmental movement, sucking funding and energies away from tackling real issues such as pollution reduction and species at risk. Besides the strategic blunder of focussing on an issue the general public seems to not really care much about, there is a serious ethical problem that will come back to haunt the movement as the public becomes better informed.

Documents such as the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change illustrate that debate rages in the scientific community about the causes of climate change. Scientists cannot yet even agree on whether cooling or warming lies ahead, let alone how much we affect the climate. Yet global warming campaigners assert that "the science is settled." We know for certain, they claim, that our carbon dioxide emissions will cause a planetary emergency unless we radically change our ways.

This makes no sense, of course. Uncertainty is inherent to all science, especially one as complicated as climate change.

The consequence of this overconfidence is tragic. According to the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative, of the over one-half trillion dollars that is now spent annually across the world on climate finance, 91% goes exclusively to mitigation, trying to control future climate states. Only 7% of global climate finance is dedicated solely to helping vulnerable people cope with climate change in the present. Based on an unfounded and increasingly improbable hypothesis about the causes of climate change, we are letting people suffer today so as to possibly help those yet to be born. As the public come to understand this, they will soon regard the climate crusade as fundamentally immoral and the focus of today's environmental movement ridiculous.

That scenario, not hypothetical future climate, is what should most concern the real environmentalists who worked on Earth Day this year.

______________

Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition - Canada (www.icsc-canada.com).