Climate Change and the Rhetoric of Belief
Katie Brown /
In April of this year, when a student in Turkey asked President Obama how he was different from President Bush, Obama said,
“When it comes to climate change, George Bush didn’t believe in climate change. I do believe in climate change, I think it’s important.”
In this response, Obama is pointing to a crucial facet in the rhetoric surrounding the climate change debate, which is the rift between those who believe that climate change is a crisis and those who believe that climate change is not a crisis; between those who believe that many of the problems of the world are due to climate change and those who believe that those same problems would not have been prevented by a few degrees of global cooling.