Virtually all responsible scientists agree that climate change is a crisis, but not a crisis that will “come to a head” tomorrow. It is a crisis many years in the making. The world is not going to fry into a lifeless ball of steamy dirt in the next 10 years. But the Earth is slowly becoming unlivable. Hundred-year climate events now happen frequently. Climate change is a crisis because we have known about it for 40 years and it threatens the lives of our progeny, but we have done almost nothing about it.
The world has wasted decades being fooled by companies, like Exxon-Mobil, whose scientists have known that climate change was real but didn’t want us to know, and by writers like Mr. Cal Thomas (Doubling down on crises, Aug. 15) who care only about pleasing like-minded readers, not about accurately informing his readers.
Climate science is very complicated, too complicated to be explained in a syndicated column or letter to the editor. Mr. Thomas conveniently reworked the positions of Al Gore, John Kerry, and AOC to make them look bad without explaining what they really meant. They meant “We are running out of time to redesign our economies to prevent the average global temperature increase from exceeding 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.”
The world is continuing to create a very slow-moving, life-threatening crisis that our children will experience, while we do almost nothing about it but argue. Mr. Thomas is not helping the situation with his obfuscation.
Ben Lounsbury, Auburn
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