Astronaut Piers Sellers’ Climate Change Awareness Campaign: An Uphill Battle?

Given that he has already dedicated his life to spreading awareness to the dangers of climate change, does the former NASA astronaut and climatologist Piers Sellers face an uphill battle?

By: Ringo Bones 

After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and the prognosis showing that he might have only 500 days left to live, former NASA astronaut and climatologist Piers Sellers has thus dedicated his life to spreading awareness of the dangers of climate change. Given that pancreatic cancer survival rate is less than 1-percent, Sellers has indeed dedicated himself to such a noble endeavor despite of his terminal illness and, indeed, he has a lot to be very optimistic about because back in 2015, new energy generated from renewable sources like wind and solar power has reached 90-percent. But he also faces an uphill battle because religious conservatives, especially in the United States, has harbored the belief since 1996 that all this climate change and global warming brouhaha is a scientific hoax and all climate change mitigation measures formulated so far to protect the poorest 90-percent of the world that will be mostly affected by climate change are nothing more than a “21^st Century Communist Plot”.

Especially in the U.S. Republican Party camp where none of the prospective candidates for the 2016 U.S. presidential elections even raised concerns over climate change and man-made greenhouse gas emissions. And one of the former U.S. Republican Party presidential candidates, Sen. Marco Rubio, even adopted a staunchly climate change denial stance by comparing the current science of climate change, however sound it is, to a religious cult. Despite of the wide acceptance of scientists around the world, a significant number of the powers that be in Capitol Hill still view climate change data as sham science and thus makes Piers Sellers’ climate change awareness cause face an uphill battle.