Mark Lynas is a writer on climate change, and visiting fellow at the Alliance for Science at Cornell University. The opinions in this article belong to the author.

(CNN) In a rational world, people would take climate change more and more seriously as real-world evidence for its damaging effects mount.

The dying of the Great Barrier Reef ; the crippling, ongoing drought in East Africa ; the thawing of Arctic ice. All of these should make us more determined to tackle the problem at the source by reducing our worldwide carbon emissions.

But we don't live in a rational world. Tracking the rapid rise in global temperatures has been an equally fast increase in the politically motivated denial of the basic science of climate change.

This process of anti-science posturing has now reached its nadir in the determined effort by the Trump administration to unravel former President Barack Obama's efforts to tackle global warming.

The Trump administration's war on science is fast becoming its most destructive attribute. We will never be able to tackle climate change if we continue to live in a post-truth age, where factual accuracy plays second fiddle to political ideology.