To the Editor:
The weather looks a lot like our politics these days…it dominates the news with its extremism.
We have broad and prolonged heat waves globally, malaria carrying mosquitoes at never before seen heights on mountains, droughts, floods, uncontrollable firestorms from Canada to Hawaii, and ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida reaching a bath like 101 degrees.
Our ice shelves are breaking off and melting, raising sea levels, and all-time heat records are being broken and re-broken within days. NASA puts out this statement on its web page, “There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.”
This cut-to-the-chase clarity is because climate change deniers (such as this newspaper) weasel and cherry-pick information to confuse the public much as the tobacco industry did when science was trying to show the link between cigarettes and cancer.
Back in April Dennis Warden wrote a column citing Gregory Wrightstone who refutes human contributions to making our climate dangerous. Mr. Wrightstone, as it happens, is a geologist not a climatologist and was employed by the natural gas industry for 35 years and continues to get paychecks from them on a part-time basis.
This personal data was conveniently left out of the Republican’s piece.
Mr. Warden notes that over the last 10,000 years the earth has had nine other warmer periods and “survived.” Again unmentioned is that these previous warm periods coincided with small wobbles in the Earth’s orbit in relation to the sun.
When we’d wobble sun-ward we’d warm up. When we’d wobble back we’d cool down.
And what did Mr. Warden envision when he said 10,000 years ago the Earth “survived” its warming periods?
There were only 5 million people on Earth then (the population of Finland). Today with over 8.1 billion we strain our global resources just to feed ourselves.
Stressing our planet risks hardship and death for untold millions and environmental havoc. We may sit near the top of the food chain here in America (albeit tenuously), but we have to be aware of, and act responsibly toward, our fellow man and the other denizens of our very at-risk planet.
Gasconade County Democrat Committee
gasconadedems.org
